In the final three years of her life, her inclination to have guests diminished and she moved our relationship to the telephone and computer. My reliability was becoming mercurial because, like Georgie a couple of decades earlier, I’d gone into recovery from alcohol and drugs. Unlike her, I kept relapsing. It was something we were able to talk about. Georgie couldn’t tolerate AA because of what she felt was its group-think anti-intellectualism, its traces of evangelism and moral rearmament, while I found it was the only thing that had helped me join one sober day to the next. Not only do I believe her account, but it makes more sense. The idea that Greig was a heterosexual gripped just once, and only once, by a momentary and inexplicable gay compulsion, is far less plausible. Perhaps he sought ‘reparative therapy’ in his marriage to Munca. Who knows? But it’s more likely that he was trying to conceal his sexuality than to change it. He and Munca certainly entertained large numbers of gay friends, including Liberace. Munca, who clearly thrived on intrigues and pretences, may well have been delighted to enter into a cooked-up marriage. It comes over you only rarely in life: the swoony feeling that a book might almost have been written for you. Two weeks after I finished it, I can’t stop thinking about Kiss Myself Goodbye, Ferdinand Mount’s extraordinary memoir of his Aunt Munca. Like someone in love, all I want to do is talk about it, a situation that’s sorely testing the patience of my domestic colleague, who must now attend a Munca symposium at approximately 7.30pm every night. (There is only one speaker: me.) Betty reminded PG of one of his clients in the quite distant past, a woman who had her own unique style of divorcing (“dumping” might be a better term) a series of husbands.

To quote Sir Walter Scott "Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!" This book is a delicious account of how a family has risen in society, whilst all the time not ever being true to its roots due to the tangled web of lies and deceit. Was he frightened of Thatcher? “You couldn’t not be frightened of her! But sometimes, she would annoy you into being a bit braver, and you’d say: ‘Well, I really wonder if that is true, prime minister.’” If he sounds a bit like Sir Humphrey in Yes, Minister, he is also able to see how things must sometimes have felt from her side. “The snobbery [Thatcher was, famously, the daughter of a grocer] was quite startling, stretching all the way from Christopher Soames [the Conservative cabinet minister] to Jonathan Miller [the theatre director]; the use of suburban as the ultimate insult, combined with sexism of a kind which even then seemed out of date.”

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And so Kiss roll into Britain for their third last-ever-time. Their End of the Road tour – which has now lasted longer than the first world war and used nearly as many explosives – has already come to these shores in 2019 and 2022, each time promising to be the final UK shows (there was also a Kiss Farewell Tour in 2000-2001, but that didn’t make it to Europe). Nevertheless, here they are again, kabuki makeup and pyrotechnics present and correct. Mount is one of our finest prose stylists and Kiss Myself Goodbye is a witty, moving and beautifully crafted account of one woman’s determination to live to the full.

It needs a writer of wit, imagination and empathy to carry me along from one layer of the tissue to the next. Mount is such a writer. As I read on, I noticed that these scenes had been described in meticulous detail, but I’d been erased from them. Georgie was one remove away from a birth-parent to me. Indeed, she was far more a mother to me than Munca ever was to her. Imagine reading a book about a mother-figure in your life, describing with painstaking precision occasions where you were present but excising you from them. It stung. I was startled that Mount would do something so improper. When two people telephoned me to say they’d noticed the same thing, I realised my reaction wasn’t just down to bruised ego and pettiness.

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The second thing was the mention of Sheffield and there is a fabulous lengthy chapter in the book about my home city in the late 19th and early 20th century. I'm sure any reader would agree that there is something extra special about reading about a place you know well. And then there's that gorgeous cover with the image of a glamorous looking man and woman lightly holding hands. I was desperate to know their story. But something tells me that Munca will be around for a while yet. She can’t be shaken off. I will always think of her, and I never even knew her.

So who was Aunt Munca? She was married to Mount's uncle, his father's brother, for over 20 years, but Munca (a portentous sign that she abandoned all names except that of Beatrix Potter's Bad Mouse!) made sure that her previous lives were unknown to the wealthy family she finally fortuitously (for her) married into. Delightfully compulsive and unforgettably original. Mount unpeels the layers of this mysterious life with the tenacity of an experienced detective and the excitement of a fresh-eyed enthusiast. * Hadley Freeman, author of House of Glass: The Story and Secrets of a Twentieth-Century Jewish Family * When I was 21, I came out to her by letter. I was terrified. I had been deeply wounded by being outed at school, twice. I was part of the Section 28 generation, unable to go to any authority figure with my worries about being gay in a country that openly hated gay people. Under Margaret Thatcher, the gay liberation gains made in the ’70s were gradually reversed, to the point where the government and the newspapers that supported it were starting to agitate for the re-criminalisation of homosexuality. After I was outed at 16, with disastrous consequences, every self-preserving fibre in me rallied and I ‘inned’ myself permanently so as to survive. The book is like a breath of fresh air and un like any other book I have ever read. It is quirky, quintessentially British and very charming. It is also fascinating, entertaining and funny. The author has a very relaxed style of writing, almost conversational in nature. Add to that any number of wry comments and amusing asides, as well as the ability to laugh at the ridiculous antics of his own family and you really have a very special book indeed. On top of all that it is an exceedingly enjoyable romp through the social history of British high society during most of the 20th Century. Also on the shelves is a photograph of Georgie at about eight years old. She does look haunted. None of the gaiety, confidence, or spontaneity of childhood is apparent. Instead, her expression seems to ask: ‘Am I doing this right?’ Her hair has been glossed into perfect, golden ringlets more appropriate for a Moulin Rouge attraction than a child. There was nothing wrong with her original nose. Why on earth did Munca arrange that operation, saddling Georgie with an implausible story about falling over, which she had to recite if anyone recognised the tell-tale, too-perfect symmetry of the nose-job. Fortunately, before their friendship broke down, my father photographed Georgie across four decades — images that show her at her happiest.There's such a feeling of love from the author to his family - regardless if they are biological or otherwise, this marks the author out as someone who has taken a huge amount of thought as to how and why this book needs to be written. Of course, people are more complex than ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Some of the unearthed secrets partly explain why Munca was the way she was. There are moments when the reader almost roots for her as she constructs one deception after another with a dizzying panache. And although she’s driven by acquisitiveness and the desire for riches and status, she’s also propelled by a more understandable self-preservation. Less clear is why Greig would ever have been party to something that harmed a child.

This is a nice attitude, but it requires context: Mount was deeply embedded in the very government that considered re-criminalising homosexuality and introduced Section 28, which consigned a generation of young LGBT people to unnecessary torment, unable to seek counsel or support or help. It was the very same government that took enormous trouble to re-stigmatise parenthood outside marriage, reserving its harshest criticisms for single mothers rather than fathers. The idea that such cruelties now lie beyond his imagination is, for me, a suspension of disbelief too far.Immersing himself in birth and marriage archives along with newspaper reports of divorce and bigamy cases, among other tidbits, Mr. Mount uncovers a camouflaged trail that begins in the industrial north of England, about as far from the Café de Paris as you can get. “She was the daughter of John William Macduff of Sheffield, a scrap metal merchant,” Mr. Mount learns of Betty’s sister, Doris, who “told the truth when she filled in a form.” Betty, on the other hand, always pretended that Doris was an unrelated “honorary aunt,” even though the two women lived near each other in opulent Berkshire where Betty “in her Rolls might bump into Doris in her Bentley any day of the week.” For both sisters had married well, if a little too often in Betty’s case. Kiss Myself Goodbye is a work of beauty. The simple truthfulness of Ferdinand Mount’s storytelling is irresistible. What Georgie had gone through had a terrible impact on her development but, like so many traumatised people, she’d found a way to transcend it. And the more she sought distance from the Mounts, the more she became herself. Because she was forced to act throughout her upbringing, some of Georgie’s natural, spontaneous reactions had disappeared. She had to make a kind of snorting noise to signify laughter. Her real laugh rarely surfaced. This was an affliction I could recognise. It transpires that Ferdinand Mount (the author) has quite a colourful family history. It is impossible to say too much without giving away spoilers. However, suffice it to say that his Aunt Munca, with whose family he spent many a happy childhood holiday, was not necessarily quite what she seemed. Later in life he started to look into the minutiae of her life and this book is the result of his findings. The life of Buster is hard to uncover, not least because a Google search brings up mainly dogs. After many false leads and dead ends, Mount finally pieces the story together: Buster Baring was married and divorced seven times, before dying in his 50s; his marriage certificates variously describe him as an electrical engineer, ­professional dancer, Grand Prix driver, manager of a joinery and cabinet works, timber merchant, farmer, author, and man “of independent means”. Did Buster know that Munca was his mother? Who did he think was his father? And who on earth were Munca’s real parents?