Outlaws of America by Roger Lewis

Roger Lewis was born in industrial South Wales in the past century, schooled in Scotland, and became a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, at the age of twenty-four, despite his claims that he was an aristocratic orpan abandoned in the jungle and reared by monkeys. Lewis, who received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters in 2010, divides his life between a decaying Georgian castle in the Herefordshire Balkans and a flat above a dirndl shop in the imperial spa town of Bad Ischl, near Salzburg in Austria, which was adapted into the Golden Globe and Emmy award-winning film starring Geoffrey Rush and Charlize Theron. He can always be found in Rules, a wonderful old-world restaurant in Covent Garden, when he's in London.