An Unanchored Heart - Hardcover

Knight Bruce, Rory

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1912945398 ISBN 13: 9781912945399

Publisher: Mount Orleans Press, 2022

Synopsis

Rory Knight Bruce is known primarily as a journalist for national newspapers and magazines. But in this searing personal memoir he recounts an early life of parental abandonment; his father a war-damaged Devon huntsman; his mother an aristocratic Irish ‘bolter’ whom he first saw on television hosting a daytime quiz show. There follows his escape from the family’s Devon farm ― to which he was to return aged forty ― to Stowe (where he was head boy) to the University of Edinburgh (where he was an elected student politician shortly after Gordon Brown). He then joined the staff of The Spectator and London Evening Standard. As editor of the Standard’s Londoner’s Diary, Dame Barbara Cartland called him: “The most dangerous man in London.” Many of his ‘spats’, with Jeffery Archer, Sir Robin Day and Martin Amis, are recounted in this highly personal journey. John Osborne called him “A worm, like me, alone and against himself.” Martin Amis, in The Information, cast him as Rory Plantagenet, “The compromised and epicene diarist on a London evening paper.” He was the inspiration for the Hugh Grant figure in Notting Hill (he had a flat there for a time) when Grant becomes the Horse & Hound correspondent. This was a role Knight Bruce fulfilled, alongside his other Fleet Street journalism, for more than thirty years. His final prep school report called him: “A wild and mercurial talent.” It has turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophesy. The travel writer Barnaby Rogerson, who was a university contemporary, once described him in print as: “One of the most persuasive and discreet womanisers of his generation. Depending on your point of view he was either a zeitgeist or maverick.” A.N. Wilson once said of him in Tatler: “A cruel tongue but a kind heart.”

About this title

About the Author

Knight Bruce was born in 1956 of Irish and Scottish parents at the Poltimore stately nursing home in Devon, which burned down shortly afterwards. His mother left home when he was one, leaving him in a hedgerow with a tractor driver, to pursue a television career. He was then brought up on his family farm by a succession of farm workers and au pairs, the latter of whom, one neighbour remarked, “Did more than the hoovering for his father.” Twenty years ago, on his father’s death, he returned to take on the farm of his childhood, a couple of derelict cottages and inherited the remaining Finnish au pair who, often ‘with drink’, he soon found offering his family silver to the postman for favours. But years behind a Fleet Street typewriter had barely prepared him for the task ahead and the abandonment of the hopes and memories he left behind.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mount Orleans Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1912945398
• ISBN 13: 9781912945399
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224