<p>Leo's mother, Madam Sara Bresson, wasn't good with babies. She never claimed to be. She had her Gift, her charisma, her successful career as a Spiritualist medium, and there simply wasn't room in her life for sleepless nights or soggy nappies. Therefore, with her husband (Leo's father Maurice Moon, a music hall conjuror and xylophone player) out of the picture having recently decamped, she donated Leo as soon as was decent to her widowed mother Clare.</p><p>An agreeably wealthy woman, Clare had conveniently just returned from India following the alcohol-related death of her husband, a senior officer in the British army there. Clare welcomed a grandchild. It was good to be needed.</p><p>Now, today, eighty-odd years later, Leo is living again in the house in Cheltenham that his grandmother Clare bought all those years ago. And D. G. Compton, previously better known perhaps as a science fiction writer, has set himself a biographical task here, charting at least a few of the more significant vicissitudes, big and little, that have shaped Leo's nature and life, and have left us with this slightly wise (he hopes) old gent.</p>