The deliciously funny confessions of a debutante which became an international bestseller

The deliciously funny confessions of a debutante which became an international bestseller It is the early 1960s, and eighteen-year-old Charlotte Bingham, fresh from convent school, has been catapulted into the horrors of The Season. Though desperately on the hunt for a Superman to call her own, the country house ball circuit seems to yield nothing but an inexhaustible crop of charmless, chinless Weeds. But Charlotte’s adventures are more than sufficiently diverting: whether she’s bouffing up her hair to try and pass herself off as a beatnik, hurtling down the Champs Elysées on the back of a Vespa, or accidentally sticking her eyelids together with eyelash glue while at modelling school, her experiments in coming-of-age are never short of intrigue – and disaster. Published in 1963 when she was just nineteen, Bingham’s sparkling memoir of her trials and travails became an international bestseller. From its pages emerges a deeply lovable and relentlessly optimistic young woman – for all that her shorthand isn’t what it might be – looking for love in all the wrong places.

"Praise for MI5 and Me: 'A fun and breezy read" - Observer, Best summer books 2018

"A stone-cold comic classic … Joyfully silly" - Tatler

"Astonishing ... She still has all the exuberant delight of a teenager in telling stories to make herself and other people laugh. Long may she write" - Sunday Times

"Hilarious and candid … Filled with period detail, Bingham’s memoir is entertaining and extraordinary" - Observer

"Sparky and larky" - Guardian

"Much fun it is … Brilliant, sly, charming and flighty" - Spectator

"A Jilly Cooper heroine in a John le Carré world" - Times Literary Supplement

"One funny story follows another … You will be sure to find this book a most entertaining and enjoyable read" - Country Life