This is a remarkable and interesting intimate look at a not very lilkeable character, Logan Mountstuart. Mountstuart was born in Uruguay of a South American mother and successful English father At the father's death, mother and son go to England where they are "comfortably taken care of." Logan attends a private boys' school where he becomes friends to two boys: Ben and Peter who remain a part of his life throughout. He attends a college at Oxford, thinking he has successfully passed all this courses; in reality, he barely got by. He marries a woman with a title, has a son, Lionell, and almost immediately is bored and begins to travel for business.

After meeting Freya, he begins an affair which leads to a bitter divorce and almost total estrangement from his son. Soon WWII begins and Logan is drafted into Navel Intelligence. During this time, he comes in company of the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson. He becomes a paratrooper and is captured spending almost two years in a French prison.

After the war, he learns his wife and child have been killed. He travels with connections to his school friends meets various artists including Picasso and writers as Hemingway - to France, Portugal, and Spain. Along the way, he drinks, he smoozes, he has affairs. Eventually he marries again and becomes close to a stepdaughter.

Throughout his life, he is self-absorbed (the only people that seem to have touched him are Freya, the daughter, and the stepdaughter along with ins and outs of Ben and Peter.

The story is not told in narrative form but in the form of diary entries thoughout his long life. At first it took me a while to get into that format, but later found it fascinating - short, funny, in places and brutally crass in others.

I didn't like Logan Mountstuart but he had some redeeming qualities and at times, I felt sorry for him. It seemed a true, honest, and intimate look at the internal feelings of one man without a lot of angst - it just is what it is.

Would definitely read more by this author ( )

I found Any Human Heart: the Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart by William Boyd an enjoyable and satisfying novel. Spanning virtually all of the 20th century, Logan Mountstuart’s journals reveal the diverse and fascinating (for me, anyway) life of the title character.

In the frame story as the novel begins, an elderly man sits editing his journals, presumably for publication. These journals, kept throughout his life, begin in 1923 when 17-year old Logan is in his last year at Abbey, an upper class British boarding/prep school. The journals continue through his years at Oxford, his career in journalism and somewhat successful attempts at becoming a novelist, his love affairs and marriages, and his different careers. He publishes some books and has a successful career managing a New York art gallery; one of his later jobs is teaching English literature in Nigeria. Living in London and traveling often to Europe, especially Paris, he socializes with some of the most famous figures of the 30’s and ‘40’s arts world, among them Hemingway (who befriends him), Fitzgerald, Picasso, Ian Fleming, and Virginia Woolf (whom he doesn’t care for). Ian Fleming recruits him for British Naval lntelligence at the beginning of World War II, and one of his numerous assignments is a mission to the Bahamas to keep an eye on the activities of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, whose characters are convincingly drawn. As a journalist he covers parts of the Spanish Civil War and three decades later joins a revolutionary group of terrorists.

Logan’s life is a long and eventful one set on many continents. He succeeds and fails, wins and loses love, is happy and in despair, as his life progresses into the ‘90’s. I very much enjoyed following Logan through this very interesting life and felt at the end of the novel as if I’d lost a friend. ( )

Beautiful in sadness and in pleasure. The narrator, Logan Mounstuart, is born in Uruguay 1906, grows up in England, lives in Paris, NYC and Nigeria, and dies in rural France 1991 (85 yrs old) having experienced every decade of the 20th century. Bittersweet and thought-provoking. The narrator is neither heroic nor a villain, Themes of loss and of life constantly beginning again. Logan is both foolish and a true inspiration. The middle section drags a bit, but I suspect this is true for our lives :) ( )

Lovely sweeping novel - the story of a life - touching, interesting, great audiobook performance by Simon Vance. ( )

Like Logan Mountstuart, the main character, this is a grower. And when you think about it it’s like ‘Any Human Heart’. Most of us tend to embark on adulthood with selfish and self absorbed tendencies and life experiences gradually mellow us out. And what some experiences Mountstuart lived through. I grew to like him very much despite the womanising and the alcohol. The journal format made this an easy read and a great vehicle to get to the heart of Mountstuart’s personality. ( )