The elderly Logan Mountstuart recalls his life as recorded in his many journals. In 1926, as an Oxford student, he is keen to race his friends Peter and Ben to losing their virginity. However, his chosen girl, the feisty socialist Land Fothergill seeks only his intellectual companionship. Thus he spends illicit Sunday afternoons with Peter's girlfriend Tess until she becomes pregnant and marries Peter. Whilst promising his dying father and Uruguayan mother that he will carry on the family tinned meat business, he longs to be a writer. After meeting Ernest Hemingway in Paris, he publishes his first book, the sexy novel 'The Girl Factory', which becomes a best seller. Land is not impressed with his book, feeling it has no intellectual value. Feeling Logan is beneath her, she marries a Labour M.P., and goes on to stand for parliament herself. Logan, on the rebound, marries Lottie, the daughter of an aristocrat. They have a son, Lionel, but the marriage is not a happy one and,when in 1936, Logan goes to Spain to cover the Civil War, it is not Lottie who sees him off but the alluring BBC journalist Freya Deverell, who is carrying his child.
—don @ minifie-1