Daydream believer

by Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd

"Like the film fantasists Walter Mitty and Billy Liar, Hugh Massingberd is an inveterate daydreamer, but this unusual book is not a work of fiction - though it often reads like one, with each chapter resembling a short story in its bittersweet variations on the theme of a Paradise Lost." "A gauche, shy, blushing and buttoned-up boy from the Berkshire suburbs, he constantly escapes into a fantasy world of his own obsessive devising. He covers the walls of his bedroom with photographs of his heroes - cricketers, jockeys, actors, satirists, authors, aristocrats - who display the insouciant self-confidence, style, glamour and panache that he so painfully lacks. As a romantic young snob, his head is full of squirearchical longings. When these are inevitably frustrated, he retreats entirely into his daydreams, with their elaborate schemes for his transmogrification into bizarre amalgams of his heroes." "Much to his surprise, though, he finds himself coming face to face with many of these rea