The deliciously funny confessions of a debutante which became an international bestseller
It is the early 1960s, and eighteen-year-old Charlotte Bingham, fresh from convent school, has been catapulted into the horrors of The Season. Though desperately on the hunt for a Superman to call her own, the country house ball circuit seems to yield nothing but an inexhaustible crop of charmless, chinless Weeds. But Charlotte’s adventures are more than sufficiently diverting: whether she’s bouffing up her hair to try and pass herself off as a beatnik, hurtling down the Champs Elysées on the back of a Vespa, or accidentally sticking her eyelids together with eyelash glue while at modelling school, her experiments in comingofage are never short of intrigue – and disaster.
Published in 1963 when she was just nineteen, Bingham’s sparkling memoir of her trials and travails became an international bestseller. From its pages emerges a deeply lovable and relentlessly optimistic young woman – for all that her shorthand isn’t what it might be – looking for love in all the wrong places.
- Charlotte Bingham’s blockbusting comic classic, which she wrote at the age of 19 and went on to become an international bestseller, will be republished alongside her new memoir Spies and Stars and 2018’s MI5 and Me in paperback
- Charlotte Bingham is the author of thirty-three international bestselling novels, which have sold over 1.3 million copies TCM. With her husband Terence
- Brady she also wrote classic television series including Upstairs, Downstairs and Take Three Girls
- A sumptuous and nostalgic comfort read for fans of Nina Stibbe’s Love, Nina (68,000 TCM) and Lynn Barber’s An Education (TCM 40,000)
Reviews
“Praise for MI5 and Me: ‘A fun and breezy read” – Observer, Best summer books 2018
“A stone-cold comic classic … Joyfully silly” Tatler
Author Biography
Charlotte Bingham wrote her first book, Coronet Among the Weeds, a memoir of her life as a debutante, at the age of 19. It was published in 1963 and became an instant bestseller. Her father, John Bingham, the 7th Baron Clanmorris, was a member of M15 where Charlotte Bingham worked as a secretary. He was an inspiration for John le Carré’s character George Smiley.
Charlotte Bingham went on to write thirty-three internationally bestselling novels and, in partnership with her late husband Terence Brady, a number of successful, plays, films and TV series including Upstairs Downstairsand Take Three Girls. She lives in Somerset.