A literary jeu d'esprit, a modern-day Tristram Shandy, a hilarious satire on false scholarship, Wilson is David Mamet at his best and most mischievous. When the internet - and the collective memory of the twenty-first century - crashes, the past is reassembled from the downloaded memories of Ginger, wife of ex-President Wilson.
Nicky Haslam has always been at the centre of things wherever he is - at parties, opening nights, royal weddings - and has stories to tell of crossing paths, and more, with the cultural icons of our time: Cecil Beaton, Francis Bacon, Diana Cooper, Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Andy Warhol, Jack Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe to name but a few.
The first is to draw attention to the existence of a persisting and virtually unrecognised tradition of 'philosemitism' which manifested itself in Britain and elsewhere in the English-speaking world during every significant international outbreak of antisemitism during the century after 1840.
