ANNE GLENCONNER CALLS Oh What a Lovely Century, “a wonderful journey through twentieth century history”. It is not a journey you will find in most accounts of the period, but the young, moustachioed, army officer on the cover of this book seems to have had a gay old time, in both senses of the word.
Roderic (Roddy) Fenwick Owen was born in 1921 and died in 2011, and kept diaries amounting to over a million words which he privately published in, and . These sources were edited down to 200,000 words with Owen’s permission with the proviso “that nothing be cut on the grounds of decency”.
