NEW BOOK: Odd Boy Out is an extraordinarily revealing account of growing up in an apparently well-to-do but always strapped-for-cash middle-class English family. But it is also far more than that.

 

It is about adventures - meeting princes and presidents, visiting Death Row in America, exploring the sex clubs of Copenhagen. It is a story of a boy blessed with wit, what he got up to, and the people he met growing up in the most wonderful city in all the world in those extraordinary years after the Second World War.

 

For Odd Boy Out is about more than Gyles and his exploits: it is also a kaleidoscopic portrait of Britain from the 1950s onwards, featuring a cast drawn from politics, the media, swinging London, stage and screen, from Laurence Olivier to Twiggy.