One hundred years ago, the Royal Navy welcomed aboard the HMS Dreadnaught a delegation of Abyssinian princes, led by a Foreign Office attaché, to inspect their flagship ship in Weymouth, Dorset. Unfortunately, the Navy had not been able to find an Abyssinian flag to hoist for the occasion, so they flew the Zanzibar one instead - and played the national anthem of that country too. Their esteemed guests didn't seem to notice. Instead, they showed their enthusiasm by repeating the phrase: 'Bunga! Bunga!' and attempting to bestow military honours on their hosts, one of whom, had he looked more closely at the assembly of bewhiskered and exotically attired princes would have realised that he already knew them... as Virginia Wolfe, her brother Stephen Cole, their friends Guy Ridley, Adrian Stephen, Anthony Buxton and the artist Duncan Grant. And the FO diplomat who had brought them aboard, a certain Mr Herbert Cholmondeley, was actually the socialist socialite Horace de Vere Cole – who would reveal the scam to the Daily Mirror the next day to the mortification of the Edwardian establishment.

The Dreadnaught hoax was the pinnacle of the pomposity-skewering, practical-joking career of de Vere Cole – 'a very dangerous man to his friends' according to Winston Churchill. The mercurial media manipulator has foiled 20 previous would-be biographers over years, but thankfully has finally met his match in Nelson biographer Martyn Downer, whose meticulously researched and raucously entertaining tome brings vividly back to life both the man and the extraordinary circumstances that created him.

Born into the last golden summer of a privileged world that would be swept away forever by World War I, Horace was delivered into his life's role at Blarney Castle, the result of a much disapproved-of union between beautiful Irish aristocrat Mary de Vere and dashing English solider Major Willie Cole. Surrounded by poets and artists, he spent his childhood in the magical Issercleran house in Galway, wearing skirts to protect him from the fairies. At the age of ten he lost both his father and his hearing and, further to his torment, the idyll of Ireland was shattered by a move to the Cole estate in Berkshire and enrolment at Eton.

Here, and then at Cambridge, where Horace mixed with Lytton Strachey, Leonard Wolfe and John Maynard Keyes, his mischief-making career flourished, fuelled by his extraordinary mix of friends from high society and low entertainment – the bawdy bosom of the London music halls was where he really felt at home.

Downer's book is an intoxicating journey back into a lost world of glamour and greasepaint, trickery and tragedy that no connoisseur of the bizarre should be without.
Cathi Unsworth