Harold Mario Mitchell Acton, the son of Arthur Acton, was born in 1904. His father was an illegitimate offspring of an adviser to the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, and consequently he and Harold were less distinguished scion of the Acton family than they liked to suggest.
What transformed his father’s and his own circumstances was his American mother’s inherited wealth; it supported and shaped Harold’s long and privileged life. The main source for the character of Anthony Blanche in Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited”, Harold was a nomad, not entirely a citizen of anywhere. Waugh’s fictional depiction captures the essence:
