Guy Oddie wrote these enchanting memoirs in response to a challenge from his great friend D A C A Boyne, the much respected editor of The Architects Journal. But despite its title and its interest to historians of the so-called Modern Movement, it is less concerned with architecture than with candid hindsights of his follies and the luck which saved him from them, especially in marriage to a self-educated woman twenty years his senior and, after her death, in an intense love affair with a no less independent-minded and courageous contemporary whom he had first met (and scorned) in their college days. Graduating B.Arch at Newcastle in 1944 and with a useless Diploma in Town Planning a year later, he served for a year under Donald Gibson at Coventry before going on to the Building Research Station, where he learned to respect scientific integrity and became generously tolerated by the architectural establishment as something of a young turk, reinforced by his longstanding college friendship with the iconoclast Peter Smithson. After a period of innovative teaching at the Birmingham School of Architecture, Oddie joined the highly regarded Development Group at the Ministry of Education, inspired by the genius of the late Stirrat Johnson Marshall. Joining the staff of the less inspired University Grants Committee, he was consulted by many leading architects of the day and designed a Hall of Residence for Reading University. He then moved to Paris as consultant to a major international organisation (the OECD), which later gave him the unique title of Senior Adviser to a programme which he initiated in 1970 and is still flourishing. Finally, after fourteen years as professor of architecture at Edinburgh University, he resigned from the Architects Register, took early retirement, and turned to writing the sort of light verse that adds to the gaiety of this lively book.