“The book is so delightful you can’t put it down. I have never read another biography like it.........it is a masterpiece. ”

“If you.........had any idea of the thrill and pleasure brought to one reader at least, by your Memoir of your father....... ”

“I was delighted by its design and captured by its prose. I read it through in a single day. Humphrey, like few others could, has evaluated Reynolds Stone’s career splendidly and with remarkable balance.”

“I can honestly say it is the best £35 I have spent for a long time.”

“To say that the book is most beautifully produced is a tautology, given the designer. More than that, though, there is not a single dull or sloppy sentence.”

“I have just finished reading your Memoir of your father and write to express my admiration for your gentle and loving recollection of a great man.”

“Not only a fine tribute to him.....but also as a sketch of some of those, in that period, whose creative talents added so much to the culture of Britain.”

“It is beautifully and subtly written, so elegantly designed, and of absorbing interest.”

“The book manages to be both gripping and seriously interesting. Of course you couldn’t go too far wrong with Reynolds’ engravings and paintings on every page. ”

“Ian Archie Beck, himself an author, illustrator, printer and the husband of the Stones’ daughter Emma, has provided a selection from Janet Stone’s family albums. The book gives valuable snippets of the world the Stones created at the Old Rectory. There is something in it that recalls Lady Ottoline Morrell’s Album, which appeared in 1976 at the height of the Bloomsbury fad. Janet Stone started taking pictures in much the same way Cecil Beaton did as a child, with a Box Brownie, although she came to use a Rolleiflex in later years. The author tells us that Janet Stone would not have seen herself as ‘a technical photographer’. Even so, she had a natural eye and many of her photographs, such as one of her and her husband with Myfanwy Piper, all in evening dress in a field, are of a rare beauty. The same is true of the pictures Janet Stone took of her children, all of them beautiful to look at and all of whom have followed their father into the fine arts. Her picture of Tom Pile, the old gardener that Janet Stone described as the ‘spit of Noah’, has something Rembrandtesque about him, reminding us of Edith Sitwell’s gardener in her Sleeping Beauty, ‘old as tongues of nightingales / That in the wide leaves tell a thousand Grecian tales’. Dazzling too is the photograph of Mollie Gascoyne-Cecil, Marchioness of Salisbury, an expert gardener and a great beauty. The picture of Iris Murdoch reading The Times shows the novelist looking attractive in a way most of her photographs do not. At least one of Janet Stone’s shots is already famous, that of Kenneth Clark in profile, first reproduced on the back of the book Civilisation and again on the cover of the Harper & Row edition of Clark’s Another Part of the Wood. In his brief introduction to this book, Alan Bennett points out that Clark could never be unconscious, although it might be more accurate to say that Clark, showman that he was, was always ‘on’ – and why not? Some of the subjects here appear to have been ‘caught’ when they weren’t expecting it. James Lees-Milne looks as fierce as granite, his hair blowing back from his noble brow. Ian Archie Beck’s caption accompanying the picture of John Sparrow makes me warm to the late Warden of All Souls and his enjoyment of teasing ‘liberals’ and progressives with his support of President Nixon in 1974, which in some circles was almost as daring and courageous as supporting President Trump now. The caption is slightly inaccurate in saying that Nixon was impeached since he resigned before he could be. David Cecil was Kingsley Amis’s tutor at Oxford but to say that Amis was Lord David’s ‘pupil’ is perhaps less than accurate. The knowledge that these enchanting pictures are only samples out of thousands make me long for more. The highly attractive book recaptures moments in a magical world now gone and the price is reasonable. Anne Massey”