Berners was a great English eccentric, a composer, novelist, painter and conspicuous aesthete whose friends included Gerturde Stein, Diaghilev and Sacherverell Sitwell. The character of Lord Merlin in Nancy Mitford's THE PURSUIT OF LOVE of Love is based on Lord Berners, who used to dip his pigeons into basins of magenta, green and ultramarine so that when released they resembled, Mitford wrote, 'a cloud of confetti in the sky'.