John Fleming and Hugh Honour were giants of the art world. To Susanna Johnston, however, they were simply John and Hugh, an inseparable couple and two of her closest friends.

They had met in the 1950s at Gli Scafari, the opulent villa on the Italian Riviera of the blind writer Percy Lubbock - one of Henry James' inamoratos and Iris Origo's step father - when she was twenty one, on holiday and penniless.

Originally part of the Anglo-Italian world orbiting Bernard Berenson's I Tatti and Harold Acton's La Pietra in Tuscany, John Fleming and Hugh Honour were bemused by being lionised themselves by the super-rich who beat a path to their Villa Marchio.

This candid memoir, full of private anecdotes, illuminates these two celebrated, passionate, and very English geniuses, through a close-up of a well-seasoned friendship of over 60 years.