Born at Bletchingley, Surrey, the son of Michael Frederic Beauchamp Dennis, a lieutenant-colonel in a Scottish regiment, and his wife, Louise Bosanquet Dennis, Nigel Dennis enjoyed only a brief spell of settled family life as a child. His father was killed in action in 1918, and the boy was taken to live first in Northern Rhodesia and later in Southern Rhodesia, attending school at Plumtree, on the border with what was then Bechuanaland. By the age of fourteen he was already writing stories which appeared in the Boy's Own Paper. At fifteen, having moved to Kitzbühel in the Austrian Tyrol to join an uncle who was a British consular official, he continued his education at the progressive Odenwaldschule in southern Germany. He returned to England, his formal schooling finished, at the beginning of the 1930s and coped with the Depression by selling silk stockings and tweed suits...