Chelsea, as Max Mosley knows, has a number of little hideaways where you can spend limitless sums pursuing the sort of pleasures the world now frowns on. And I write as a dedicated habitué of one of the most outré.

My secret little rendezvous in Blacklands Terrace, SW3, is a very particular sort of establishment. Outwardly respectable men enter, spend long stretches lost to view, and then leave after having parted with several crisp notes, their spirits restored and a naughty smile playing about their features. There aren't many places quite like it, although there is one, almost identical, in Mayfair that I also patronise. In Curzon Street, if you must know...

Now there's nothing strictly illegal about either of these joints. And I generally make sure Mrs Gove knows about my visits. But I can't rely on the rest of the world being so forgiving. For when I go to Blacklands Terrace or to Curzon Street, to the establishments known as John Sandoe's and Heywood Hill, respectively, I'm generally indulging in the sort of activity that can get you a terrible reputation these days. Both of these places are bookshops. But they openly stock - and I'm searching for - the sort of stuff you don't generally get elsewhere so easily. The sort of literature that is somewhere between samizdat and straightforward under-the-counter stuff, simultaneously politically subversive and deliciously naughty. I'm looking for memoirs of upper-class life.

In a publishing world dominated by misery memoirs, where the more grotesquely cruel the childhood the bigger is the advance, a world of Angela's Ashes and A Child Called “It”, I run screaming in the opposite direction. At a time when the intimate revelations that most grip the nation are those of plastic (in every sense of the word) celebrities, from Jordan to Sharon Osbourne, I want a very different sort of life story to curl up with. One in which emotions are carefully hidden, so as not to be too much of a bore, feelings are generally repressed, because it doesn't do to make a fuss, and the delicate re-touching that wins admiring glances is of the wainscoting in the dower house, not of the zeppelins in the Wonderbra.

So I'm a sucker, I'm afraid, for the diaries of James Lees-Milne and Anthony Powell, as well as being a devotee of the latter's novels, and I'm up for any collection of letters between double-barrelled literary types from a generation ago, accounts of Anglo-Irish peers fighting to maintain standards as their patrimonies shrivel, narratives of bohemian excess in pre-Sixties Soho, chronicles of donnish infighting from political academics and gossipy revelations from the world of politics, especially if they're also seasoned with high-table wit.

Now I freely confess that too much of this sort of stuff can give you literary tooth decay. Spending long hours dipping into James Lees-Milne is like lunching on violet creams - it's a form of self-indulgence that can't really be justified on any grounds other than pure, decadent pleasure-seeking. Most serious-minded souls would suggest that you'd be better off having a quick Lees-Milne only after something more substantive. Three courses of, say, Noam Chomsky or Robert Fisk.

But I'm here to say junk all that. And to recommend one recently published book which, as it happens, has all the creamily violet Lees-Milnery you could want plus a fruity slice of Anthony Powell, not to mention a nut cluster of Philby, Burgess and Maclean, some headily dark Isaiah Berlinisms, an array of juicy high political anecdotes and lots of bittersweet Anglo-Irish wistfulness to savour as well.

Ferdinand Mount probably won't thank me for bracketing his wonderful book, Cold Cream, as an upper-class memoir. Although his mother was an earl's daughter and he went on to Eton and Oxford, Mount was never swaddled in wealth as a child nor cosseted by privilege as an adult. Yet his book has many of those qualities that I associate with authors such as his uncle Anthony Powell, and which are now more than a tad unfashionable. He has dry wit, emotional restraint, admirable but not exaggerated self-effacement, fantastic recall of telling vignettes, a keen eye and ear for character that helps bring alive a cast of eccentrics whose personalities are all the more vivid for living at a time and in a way where they didn't need to be “respectable”.

As someone who values respectability a great deal, whose soul is bourgeois and whose viewpoint is provincial, whose personal instincts are all with trade, with the striving and the self-made, whose heart is with the Lloyd George of the People's Budget and the Peel of the Corn Law Repeals, I am not a natural recruit to the cavalier cause. I have no desire myself to revisit Brideshead.

But I do enjoy reading the accounts of those who made it, however fleetingly, their home. Or whose uncles struggled to keep it going. Mount is a brilliant writer because he combines an understanding of why an account of high bohemia and the declining fortunes of the lower aristocracy is so fascinating with an authorial detachment that means he is never himself defined, or imprisoned, by the environments he inhabits. His sympathy is too wide-ranging and his intelligence too penetrating to allow him to be narrowly pinned down as a representative of any caste.

Mount gives us in Cold Cream a work that is a brilliant collection of anecdotes which illuminate Britain in the second half of the 20th century, a world curiously fading from our memories. But it is also a moving account of his own family, which is all the more affecting for possessing precisely the understatement that defines a certain sort of Englishman, now rather sadly passing out of fashion. Do read it.

Sugar or spice on a Sunday night?

At lunch last weekend the hottest topic was the nature of ideal Sunday night viewing. There was a general feeling that the departure of Kingdom (decent scenery, gentle humour, just-about-plausible plotting) has left a vacuum. One faction argued that what was required was nothing more than lush scenery, gentle plotting and just-about-plausible humour - shows such as Monarch of the Glen or Heartbeat. In the opposite corner was a small, vocal faction that said the best Sunday night show was 24 and the best way to prepare for the week ahead was a shot of visual adrenalin.

In the middle was a group that argued straightforwardly for classic costume drama, but even here there were tensions, with one or two favouring easy viewing of the Lark Rise to Candleford variety, while others thought something darker, à la Andrew Davies's Vanity Fair, was called for.

I'd be fascinated by readers' views, as I suspect would channel controllers. Because, let's face it, whatever the answer is, it isn't Headcases.

Added VAT flavour

Marks & Spencer's recent victory in the courts, in which it established that its chocolate teacakes are cakes, not biscuits, means we won't have to pay VAT on these goodies. The case had other benefits. It revealed that gingerbread men decorated with chocolate count as biscuits eligible for VAT unless the chocolate amounts to no more than a couple of dots for eyes. However, bourbon and other biscuits where the chocolate forms a sandwich layer, with no chocolate on the outside, are zero-rated. Chocolate shortbread incurs VAT, but “millionaire's” shortbread where the chocolate is separated from the shortbread by a caramel layer is zero-rated. Isn't it nice of the EU to give us this delightful VAT regime to make life more fascinating for us all?

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath.

Times Recommends

• Navigating the new global archipelago
• Comment: McCain isn't Bush and voters know it
• Religion's history of self-inflicted pain