SOURCE: “Places and Friends He Still Can Recall,” in Spectator, September 4, 1993, p. 26.

In the following review of Yesterday Came Suddenly, Lively commends King's memoir, which she feels is an engaging and moving work, in large part because of King's use of anecdotes and lengthy dialogue segments.

Autobiography comes in many guises—as stern narrative, as expiation, as justification, as smokescreen. Francis King is an accomplished raconteur and it is in this style that he has chosen to write his—a sequence of anecdotes by means of which the great array of people with whom he has been associated trip in and out of the pages. The result is [Yesterday Came Suddenly] a book which is always entertaining and sometimes moving. It is a book about others quite as much as it is about the author, which is appropriate, since clearly Francis King's consuming interest is in the quirky...