Bravo. Any Human Heart tells the life story in diary form of novelist and literary critic Logan Mountstuart (1906-1991), a likable and roguish hero. We live through his marriages, dalliances, literary success and frustrations, good decisions and bad, and his successes and failures. He is afforded good luck and bad (as he might put it). He meets an entertaining array of prominent 20th Century figures including Hemingway, Picasso, Evelyn Waugh, Frank O'Hara, Jackson Pollock, Virginia Wolff, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, James Joyce and others, which is tremendous fun (all of these figures are convincingly portrayed and none suffer through gratuitous cameos).Mountstuart's life comes to include many genres -- spy, adventure, romance, marital drama, historical drama -- and what you get in the end is the mix of half-successes, failures, fantasies, longings, intrigues and relationships good and bad that comprise lives, and that in this case come together as quite a moving story. It was pleasant and enlightening to share 70 years with Mountstuart; when it's over, one misses his company. Mountstuart is not a romantic figure with grand, world-changing goals, but he has his set of standards and tries to uphold them over time. The credo he adopts in the Spanish civil War has two hates and three loves: hatred of injustice, hatred of privilege, love of life, love of humanity, love of beauty. He describes the spirit of the Cosmopolitans, a French school of pre-WWI poets about whom Mountstuart writes his third book, thusly: "They are all about romance, about life's excitement and adventure and its essential sadness and transience. They savour everything both fine and bittersweet that life has to offer - stoical in their hedonism." It is the spirit in which Mountstuart lives his life.Boyd's literary style is elegant but not flashy, just right for the diary form. The evolving voice of the character at different ages is totally convincing, as is Boyd's evocation of a diverse set of places and times. As Mountstuart says, "You cannot live on caviar and foie gras every day: sometimes a plain dish of lentils is all the palate craves, even if one insists that the lentils come from Puy." Well said.I loved it, read it quickly and now feel lucky to have found a great new (to me) author.