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Back in the Day: Melvyn Bragg's deeply affecting, first ever memoir

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But no Enid Blyton for us), The Goon Show on the radio (we listened to The Navy Lark, Educating Archie and Hoirney into Space, but these were a little later). His years in the 6th form, his first love, and how he got to Oxford, or nearly didn't, rivetting stuff. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). Also explored intimately are the social pressures and conformities of living in an intimate community like Wigton, where there was togetherness and mutual help, but also lifelong marks of inferiority felt by his mother over her illegitimate birth, something that Melvyn shows her spending her whole life compensating for; his pride in the quietly triumphant way that she succeeded in this is unmistakeable.

Put that to one side for the minute and judge this book as a cultural and social history of growing up in a Cumbrian market town in the 40s and 50s (I grew up in one in the 60s and 70s. When my brother and I went to stay with my mother's parents, there was an outside lavatory and the toilet paper was newspaper cut into squares. Photograph: Louise Court/Melvyn Bragg View image in fullscreen Melvyn Bragg: ‘so often hits on something wise and even numinous’. Clearly the book brings back so many of my own memories but I am sure any reader will enjoy this real life story of growing up in a much loved place with much loved people.By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. The first 200 pages are an impressionistic jumble of memories and feelings from early childhood; the second (the two are divided by a serious mental and physical breakdown that seems to come out of nowhere at the age of fourteen) show him developing a love of learning, literature and hard intellectual labour that would underpin his later professional life. And the description of his first real love, which we know cannot last beyond the end of the book, had me very close to tears. This has all the hallmarks of a frank and sincerely honest book; a pastiche of look-in-the mirror reflections; a series of early-life’s paradoxes and contradictions.

Bragg's book, the best thing he's ever written, imbues the overused literary adjective "piercing" with real meaning . He discovers the enjoyment that can be found in books, in reading and studying and analyzing what he personally draws from a given author’s writing.In Back in the Day, Bragg revisits and reflects on his life spent in the Cumbrian market town of Wigton during the 1940s and 50s,.

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