Born in Ukraine on the first day of the century, a Jewish antisemite, Pyat careered through three decades like a runaway train. Bisexual, cocaine-loving engineer/inventor/spy, he enthusiastically embraces Fascism. But his extraordinary luck leaves him after he witnesses Hitler's massacre of R"hm and the SA. At last he is swallowed up in a Dachau concentration camp. Thirty years later, having survived the Spanish Civil War, he is living in Portobello Road and telling his tale to a writer called Moorcock.