Since Jackdaw Cake is subtitled ‘An Autobiography’, between inverted commas, we might think of the book as ‘unreliable memoirs’. The first two parts of the book, about his childhood, are written in a strain of hyperbole, sometimes as pleasingly Welsh as Dylan or Gwyn Thomas. Before we reach the third section, about his pre-war adventures among Arabs, Cubans and Sicilians, we have been astonished by his weird boyhood in Carmarthen and Enfield, where his experiences seem scarcely less bizarre and exotic. We no longer think of him as a superior anthropologist heartlessly inspecting lesser breeds, for he has already played the Martian in Britain: perhaps all children are ‘Martian’. The fourth and final section of the book is mostly about his wartime experiences, as a sergeant in Intelligence. His friends, he tells us, when he announced his intention of becoming a writer, urged him not to bore his readers with war stories. So he wrote 14 other books before the celebrated Naples ’44, and now he ends his memoir with equally interesting war stories, largely about Algeria and Tunis, which are quite relevant to the preceding sections but take a slightly different tone.