Lord Berners

[7] Berners was educated at Cheam School and Eton College, then studied in France and Germany while attempting to pass the entry examination for the Foreign Office.

He appears in many books and biographies of the period, notably portrayed as Lord Merlin in Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love.

[13] He was a friend of the Mitford family and close to Diana Guinness, although Berners was politically apathetic and was deeply dismayed by the outbreak of the Second World War.

[14] Berners was notorious for his eccentricity,[15] dyeing pigeons at his house in Faringdon in vibrant colours and at one point entertaining Penelope Betjeman's horse Moti to tea.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, who stayed as a guest, recalled: "No dogs admitted" at the top of the stairs and "Prepare to meet thy God" painted inside a wardrobe.

Later pieces were composed in a more accessible style, such as the Trois morceaux, Fantaisie espagnole (1919), Fugue in C minor (1924), and several ballets, including The Triumph of Neptune (1926) (based on a story by Sacheverell Sitwell) and Luna Park, commissioned for a C. B. Cochran London revue in 1930.

[20] His final three ballets, A Wedding Bouquet, Cupid and Psyche and Les Sirènes, were all written in collaboration with his friends Frederick Ashton (as choreographer) and Constant Lambert (as music director).

There are also scores for two films: The Halfway House (1943) and Nicholas Nickleby (1947), for which Ealing's music director, Ernest Irving, provided the orchestrations.

His autobiographies First Childhood (1934), A Distant Prospect (1945), The Château de Résenlieu (published posthumously)[23] and Dresden are both witty and affectionate.

Berners obtained some notoriety for his roman à clef The Girls of Radcliff Hall (punning on the name of the famous lesbian writer), initially published privately under the pseudonym "Adela Quebec",[24] in which he depicts himself and his circle of friends, such as Cecil Beaton and Oliver Messel, as members of a girls' school.

[See Collected Tales and Fantasies, New York, 1999] In January 2016, he was played by actor Christopher Godwin in episode 3 of the BBC Radio 4 drama What England Owes.