The worst crime was to be a bore

Gully Wells is a spirited and amusing writer, the daughter of the American journalist Dee Wells and the stepdaughter of the famous philosopher Freddie Ayer. While an undergraduate at Oxford she had an affair with Martin Amis and travelled to Italy with him, a trip fictionalised in his recent novel, The Pregnant Widow (conveniently out in paperback at just the same moment as this memoir appears, for ease of cross-referencing). Wells worked for the publisher George Weidenfeld before marrying and moving to New York, where today she’s the features editor of a travel magazine. Christopher Hitchens and Anna Wintour are among her pals.

Her parents divorced when Gully was tiny. Not long afterwards, her ambitious and dogmatically unconventional mother laid siege to Freddie Ayer, who was much older, married and had a strong-willed long-term mistress, as well as various offspring, official and otherwise. None of which was enough to deter Dee Wells.