A coronet among the weeds

It is the early 1960s, and eighteen-year-old Charlotte Bingham, fresh from convent school, has been catapulted into the horrors of The Season. Though desperately on the hunt for a Superman to call her own, the country house ball circuit seems to yield nothing but an inexhaustible crop of charmless, chinless Weeds. But Charlotte's adventures are more than sufficiently diverting: whether she's bouffing up her hair to try and pass herself off as a beatnik, hurtling down the Champs Elysées on the back of a Vespa, or accidentally sticking her eyelids together with eyelash glue while at modelling school, her experiments in coming-of-age are never short of intrigue - and disaster.

Published in 1963 when she was just nineteen, Bingham's sparkling memoir of her trials and travails became an international bestseller. From its pages emerges a deeply lovable and relentlessly optimistic young woman - for all that her shorthand isn't what it might be - looking for love in all the wrong places.