‘That’s my regret…a four-legged regret with six sharp horns’ – so says a paranoid Ernest Hemingway of the affair which shattered his first marriage, and marked his path as a hell-raiser, haunted by past mistakes.

Hotchner’s elegant little book recreates a conversation with his friend, who was being treated in a psychiatric ward, and who bluntly reveals his own emotional failings while relishing his hunting, shooting, fishing, drinking days.

A clear-eyed portrait of a complex man.

Hemingway in Love: His Own Story by A. E. Hotchner (Picador, £14.99) is out now