Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. By his own admission, in earlier life he "had been drawn to three autocracies: German National Socialism, Communism, and the Roman Catholic Church." Burn''s father was secretary and solicitor to the Duchy of Cornwall becoming a trusted confidant of the King; while his mother''s family was instrumental in developing the golf-and-gambling resort of Le Touquet[1]. Initially educated at Winchester College, Burn spent only one year at Oxford before the social seductions of Le Touquet won out. As he himself put it, he was not sent down. Having done none of the work expected of him, he simply did not go back, choosing instead to initiate a writing career by ghosting the autobiography of ''Bentley Boy'' Sir Henry Birkin. Burn spent an amount of time in Florence, befriending Alice Keppel, the former mistress of Edward VII. A bisexual, his lovers included later Soviet Union spy Guy Burgess. On two occasions during the 1930s Burn took himself to the police, as homosexuality was then a crime.
