In chronicling the various "lives" of his former Telegraph colleague, Robinson does not hide Deedes's dismal failure in some of them. He had a good war, winning the MC in the thrust towards Germany after D-Day; he was fun to lunch or travel with, as Princess Diana found; he provided superb material for humorists, as the partial model for Evelyn Waugh's William Boot and the supposed recipient of Private Eye's "Dear Bill" letters; and he reinvented himself remarkably in his 70s as a globe-trotting correspondent, forming a double act with a young female journalist with whom he became infatuated. But both as a minister in Macmillan's government and as the Telegraph's editor in the decade before Conrad Black's takeover, he epitomised the hidebound feebleness of a dying regime; and the future national treasure was a remote dad who went to farcical lengths to avoid spending time with his family. Robinson's engrossing biography recalls John Mortimer's A Voyage Round My Father in combining affection with a candid study of atavistic eccentricity.