“Are you familiar with the work of the Master?” was the first question Hugh Massingberd used to ask aspiring obituarists, by which he meant not Henry James but P. G. Wodehouse. I can think of no more congenial or reassuring inquiry from a prospective employer. In the context of death notices, though, it isn’t quite what one expects to hear. And yet Massingberd, during his 1986–1994 tenure as obituaries editor for The Daily Telegraph, applied a Wodehousian aesthetic—call it the Blandings sublime—to such good effect that the once-ignored column attracted a cult following and spawned no less than five bestselling anthologies, of which the current volume purportedly represents la crème de la crème.

What then, in obituary terms, does the lesson of the Master dictate? Above all, a preponderance of subjects who are—to use Massingberd’s habitual epithet—fruity. Not fame or accomplishment but rampant eccentricity is the chief criterion for inclusion. So we are treated to a colorful succession of potty minor peers, “bristling brigadiers” (as Massingberd labels them), and other quintessential English types, all embalmed in equal parts affection and irreverence.

Some of my own favorite obits here, however, are of a different stripe, more roundly mocking and even downright venomous. The one for Billy Carter begins:

Billy Carter, who has died age 51, was President Jimmy Carter’s hard-drinking roly-poly brother whose bibulous verandah-chair comments from the peanut township of Plains, Georgia, caused periodic embarrassment at the White House.

What adjectives! One can almost hear the (anonymous) writer smacking his lips with cruel delectation. Similarly, the notorious vixen Barbara Skelton—who has often been proposed as a model for Pamela Flitton in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time—is described as having enjoyed a “career of petulant promiscuity.” Skelton achieved a sort of exquisite marital chiasmus: her first husband, Cyril Connolly, divorced her on grounds of adultery with George Weidenfeld, who, having become her second husband, divorced her in turn on grounds of adultery with … Cyril Connolly. Of her third marriage, to the physicist Derek Jackson, the obituarist comments: “The union, dominated by Skelton’s menagerie of small violent mammals, was of brief duration.” I’m not quite sure what the middle part of that sentence means, but I shall never cease to savor it.

Daydream Believer is Massingberd’s autobiography. His life has been shadowed by a sense of Peerage Lost, for the baronetcy turned down by his great-grandfather would have devolved on him. In a second abasement, he was cheated of Blessingbourne, the romantic family pile in County Tyrone, and had palmed off on him instead a far lesser estate in Lincolnshire. To compensate for these deprivations, Massingberd threw himself into genealogy, overseeing The Landed Gentry and other “stud books” and writing and editing dozens of allied volumes on the British and Irish aristocracy and country houses, until finally he persuaded The Daily Telegraph-owning Berry family, who had been “not all that keen on death,” to let him take over the languishing obits, which he gave up only after a heart attack forced him into retirement.

So much for Massingberd’s c.v.—no Sir Richard Burton he. Yet the book’s main focus is not action but thought of a kind. Subtitled Confessions of a Hero-Worshipper, it relates how Massingberd, further to blunt the pain of his insufficiently squirearch- ical circumstances, has since childhood glommed onto one idealized figure after another and woven for himself elaborate fantasy existences, “underpinned by painstaking research.” He has had the good fortune to meet many of his heroes, some of whom “only increased in stature on acquaintance.” Others, however, proved “a grave disappointment,” such as Earl Mountbatten, who, when Massingberd was working on The Landed Gentry, tried to pressure him into amending the royal surname to Mountbatten-Windsor.

The earliest objects of Massingberd’s adoration and self-projection were cricketers and jockeys, but soon he turned to literary fetishism. “My fantasy world,” he writes, “began to expand in the 1960s through immersion not only in the works of P. G. Wodehouse but those of Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and John Betjeman.” From this group Powell—whose great roman-fleuve Massingberd claims to reread every year—emerged as his “chief hero.” Although he eventually became friends with “the Sage of the Chantry,” the first time Massingberd met the writer he “persisted in demonstrating the extent of my tabulation of his novels and characters to the point where he felt compelled to protest ‘My dear boy… .’” Nor is this the only time Massingberd fell prey to wonkish adulation; as he observes, “The belief that one will somehow endear oneself to a hero by laboriously reciting his achievements is one of the fallacies of fandom.”

Another literary idol whom Massingberd first embarrassed, then won over, was James Lees-Milne. Before long he found himself accompanying the diarist on one of his country-house inspection tours for the National Trust. Though avowedly heterosexual, Massingberd seems to be what a gay friend of mine calls a “straight fairy,” because people keep pegging him for what he’s not. Just so, at one house

[t]he bachelor owner, jumping to quite the wrong conclusion about the proclivities of Jim’s companion (myself), led us to a garden building adorned with a graphically explicit fresco in the muscular modern neo-classical manner. ‘What d’you think of that meaty young piece, eh, Jim?’ nudged the pederastic squire.

It should perhaps be added, by way of explanation, that Lees-Milne himself did indeed swing both ways.

Daydream Believer is brave (or at least reckless) to a degree, in that it lays its author wide open to one of the most heinous of modern charges, namely snobbery. Massingberd anticipates and fields the accusation deftly. On the one hand, he eagerly catalogs, and indeed seems to exult in, the brickbats that have been hurled his way over the years: Private Eye caricatured him as “Massivesnob,” John Gross referred to him as “a snobbish old bore,” etc. On the other, he doesn’t so much refute as deflect the charge, arguing that an obsession with genealogy betokens merely a keen interest in people. It’s a defense that holds up well for Anthony Powell, and one that will stand for Massingberd also.

Another pejorative that Massingberd seems almost to invite is “pathetic.” He wastes no opportunity to make himself look lame, foolish, gauche, or obsequious (ideally all at once) and even admits having, on his bedroom wall, a “pictorial pantheon” of his heroes. “Self-deprecation,” he remarks, “is often a transparent mask for self-regard,” but that’s not the case here. The strain of abjection in Massingberd’s temperament clearly runs deep, and the persona he’s evolved for himself, a blend of fogeyish atavism and teenage giddiness, is so peculiar that one can’t help warming to it.

Jeremy Lewis—himself the author of a charming autobiography, Playing for Time—has argued that, in contrast to poetry and fiction, “autobiography is one area in which the English have excelled in the last half- century.” I’m rather inclined to agree with him, especially given that several of the books on Lewis’s list of honor, such as Lees-Milne’s Another Self, T. C. Worsley’s Flannelled Fool, and Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, are personal favorites as well. “The best English autobiographies,” Lewis notes, “combine comicality with a sense of the sad absurdity of life,” and the same could be said of Daydream Believer. If the book comes up a little short of Lees-Milne and company, that is perhaps as the worshipful and ever-modest Massingberd would wish it.