Harry Baum dominated the family, and he dominates this book. However you look at it, he was a bully. He was a moderately successful businessman with expensive tastes, an exaggerated delight in name-dropping, and a compulsive need to control his wife and daughter. The language of warfare and international diplomacy crops up throughout the book: cold wars, battles, tactics, strategies, truces. At one stage, Baum’s husband approaches her parents on her behalf, ‘like an old-fashioned emissary sent from an enemy state ... with peace offerings’. With the wisdom of hindsight, Baum can understand the psychological forces at work in her father’s behaviour, but in her teenage years she was confused and angry: ‘surrounded by material comfort, but told that nothing was mine; smothered with love, but also controlled, judged and punished’. It is not surprising that sometimes, as she admits, ‘I was foul.’

Baum manages to convey the complications of this unhappy situation for the most part with bittersweet candour. Her father’s ‘showy materialism’ is criticised, but at some level it is also celebrated in lingering descriptions of shopping sprees, luxury travel, and prestige cars. I felt the book could have done with less of this; it could have been 100 pages shorter with advantage.