The summer I dwelt in marble halls

The discovery of a cache of long-lost love letters might be an over-familiar inspiration for a memoir, risking a bit of a dusty lane indulgence – a charming, nostalgic featherbed flop into a past romance. But although the events described by this delightful nonagenarian first-time author took place three-quarters of a century ago, there is nothing sepia-flattened about Gill Johnson’s writing. This is a book which shimmers with remarkable recall as the author returns us to the post-war vibrancy of Venice and the dazzling inhabitants who transformed her young life.

The youngest of four children, Gill reached adulthood in Blitz-scarred, rationed 1950s London. She shared a depressing, claustrophobic Westminster flat with her snobbish parents, who, unhappy with each other and life, planned for her to marry a cabinet minister ‘with boundless promise’. Her mother ‘drifted about like a mournful mannequin’ and her emasculated father, like most people then, was ‘waiting for things to improve’, as the grandfather clock in the Victorian parlour marked the dreary passage of time.