English socialite, writer and historian Harold Acton was BOTD in 1904. Born in Florence, Italy to a wealthy aristocratic family, he was sent to England to be educated. He attended Eton College in a distinguished cohort including Eric Blair (George Orwell), Cyril Connolly, Robert Byron, Ian Fleming, Brian Howard, Oliver Messel, Anthony Powell and Henry Green. He then attended Oxford University, where he founded the avant-garde literary magazine The Oxford Broom and was famous for his eccentricity, broadcasting passages from T. S. Eliot‘s poem The Waste Land through a megaphone. His Oxford friend Evelyn Waugh dedicated his debut novel Decline and Fall to Acton “in Homage and Affection”, and later used him as the basis for Anthony Blanche, the openly queer raconteur of Brideshead Revisited. After graduation, Acton lived between Paris and London, becoming a prominent member of the aristocratic social circle known as the Bright Young Things. His friendship circle included Cecil Beaton, Tom Driberg, Hamish St. Clair-Erskine, L. P. Hartley, Gavin Henderson, James Lees-Milne, Nancy and Tom Mitford, Richard, David and Olivia Plunket Greene, Edith and Osbert Sitwell and Stephen Tennant. His attempts to write fiction were compared unfavourably to Waugh’s novels, though he had better success with a series of historical studies of the Medici and Bourbon dynasties. In the 1930s, he relocated to Peking (Beijing), studying Mandarin and producing English translations of traditional Chinese drama. His 1941 novel Peonies and Ponies painted a satirical portrait of the British expatriate community in pre-war China. During World War Two, he working as a liaison officer for the Royal Air Force, with postings in India, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Paris. After the war, he returned to Florence, undertaking an extensive renovation of his childhood home Villa La Pietra and forming a relationship with German photographer Alexander Zielcke. In later life, he published two volumes of autobiography and a memoir of his friend Nancy Mitford. He lived with Zielcke in Florence until his death in 1974, aged 89.