For nearly half a century Sir Roy Strong has enjoyed a high public profile in the arts world in Britain. Yet remarkably little is known about his life before the Swinging Sixties when he burst upon the scene as the revolutionary trendy young director of the National Portrait Gallery aged thirty-one. In this book he recounts for the first time the story of his social origins & the roots of his life-long passion for the culture & history of Engl&. He describes his childhood home in a suburban North London terrace revealing himself to have been a shy solitary child of melancholy temperament painting Elizabethan miniatures & Shakespearean set designs in his teens. It follows him through grammar school & university where together with a generation of postwar 'meritocrats' like A.S. Byatt & Alan Bennett his passion for learning was awakened & nourished. We catch glimpses of seminal experiences such as his first outings to the theatre opera & ballet & his first trip abroad to Italy which was to have a lasting influence on his sensibilities. He explores key sometimes painful relationships with his family his school teacher with whom he had a lifelong correspondence & his debt to such people as C.V. Wedgwood A.L. Rowse Frances Yates & Cecil Beaton. In it we glimpse a vanished world dominated by class & hierarchy up which he climbed. As a backdrop we have the transformation of London from the drab postwar world of the 1950s to the epicentre of fashion in the 1960s & the development of Sir Roy's distinctive sartorial style inspired by the burgeoning shops on Carnaby Street. Richly illustrated with drawings letters photographs & other archival material this is an honest & compelling portrait of a young man about to step into the limelight of the British cultural scene he helped to modernize & in which he played a leading role.