‘One warm night in June 1917 I became the man who nearly killed the Kaiser’

The traditional story told about the first world war is that it changed everything: that it was the end of the old world and the beginning of the modern age, and that art and poetry could never be the same again. So it is refreshing to find, not far into Lance Sieveking’s amiable and haphazard memoirs, the claim that ‘I didn’t realise it at the time, but in 1919 I was a comparative rarity: a complete young man, a man with two arms, two legs, two lungs, two eyes.’ He had fought in the war, and came home unscathed, and that was that. Airborne: Scenes from the Life of Lance Sieveking is a slightly otherworldly book: a collection of agreeable stories drawn from a colourful life, all told with good humour and very little fuss. It reads like a document from a lost time.

Sieveking was born in 1896, into a Victorian family of suffragettes, worthy causes and cello lessons, and grew up on the south coast of England.