Here is the "riotous and disorganized reality" of Mountstuart's eighty-five years in all their extraordinary, tragic, and humorous aspects. In his journals he recounts his boyhood in Montevideo, Uruguay; his college years during the 1920s at Oxford, where he published his first book; his time in Paris with famous expatriates like Joyce, Picasso, Hemingway, among others; and his coverage of the Spanish Civil War. During World War II, as an agent for Naval Intelligence, he becomes embroiled in a murder scandal that involves the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. After the war, he relocates to New York where he works as an art dealer during the wave of abstract expressionism; until he moves on to West Africa; then London, where he has a run-in with the Baader-Meinhof Gang; finally in France, in his old age, acquiring a measure of hard-won serenity.

Any Human Heart is a moving, ambitious and richly conceived novel that embodies the heroics and follies of twentieth-century life.