Daydream believer

"Like the film fantasists Walter Mitty and Billy Liar, Hugh Massingberd is an inveterate daydreamer, but this unusual book is not a work of fiction - though it often reads like one, with each chapter resembling a short story in its bittersweet variations on the theme of a Paradise Lost." "A gauche, shy, blushing and buttoned-up boy from the Berkshire suburbs, he constantly escapes into a fantasy world of his own obsessive devising. He covers the walls of his bedroom with photographs of his heroes - cricketers, jockeys, actors, satirists, authors, aristocrats - who display the insouciant self-confidence, style, glamour and panache that he so painfully lacks. As a romantic young snob, his head is full of squirearchical longings. When these are inevitably frustrated, he retreats entirely into his daydreams, with their elaborate schemes for his transmogrification into bizarre amalgams of his heroes." "Much to his surprise, though, he finds himself coming face to face with many of these real-life figures, to whom he sucks up in excruciatingly embarrassing fashion. Along the way, the reader of this often surprising confessional is treated to fascinating vignettes of such luminaries as Anthony Powell, James Lees-Milne, E.W. Swanton, Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Auberon Waugh and Lord Mountbatten (one of several idols who proves something of a disappointment). Massingberd also owns up to being a serial stage-door 'stalker'."--BOOK JACKET.