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

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A masterly evocation of his early life in Cumbria . . . Bragg's book, the best thing he's ever written, imbues the overused literary adjective "piercing" with real meaning . . . I can't hope to capture, in the space I have here, this book's extraordinary geography, let alone its strange, inchoate beauty: the way that Bragg, in his struggle fully to explain his meaning, so often hits on something wise and even numinous (when he does, it's as if a bell sounds). All I can say is that I loved it— Rachel Cooke, Observer

This is the tale of a boy who lived in a pub and expected to leave school at fifteen yet won a scholarship to Oxford. Derailed by a severe breakdown when he was thirteen, he developed a passion for reading and study -- though that didn't stop him playing in a skiffle band or falling in love. At the start. I had trouble enjoying this book. I had to read at least half until it began to improve for me From then on, my appreciation grew and grew. Bonarjee remains the only woman of South Asian descent to have an entry in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Yet this collection, published in the Welsh Women’s Classics series, is the first edition of her poetry, much of which has never appeared in print before.

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Unlike his tyrannical father, Suleyman liked to delegate. In 1523, he chose his favourite servant, Ibrahim, to become Grand Vizier, a position of immense power, including control of one of the empire’s most important armies. Born a Christian in Parga, Albania (and hence a subject of Venice), Ibrahim was abducted as a child and sold into slavery in Anatolia. But he became so close to Suleyman that they shared the same bedchamber: “It is as if they are one and the same, the seed of the Conqueror and a boy from a beach, the Shadow of God on Earth and his shadow.”

As Andrew Whitehead writes in his introduction to this collection of Bonarjee’s poetry, her parents wanted their children to be “part of India’s England educated elite who were carving out a greater role in running the country”. They had hoped that their daughter would attend university in London. But Bonarjee found the city too “snobbish” and instead, in 1912, she opted to study French at the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth. “Where the hell is that?!” her father exclaimed, when he was told. Melvyn Bragg's first ever memoir - an elegiac, intimate account of growing up in post-war Cumbria, which lyrically evokes a vanished world. Canales, a descendent of the Quechua peoples of Peru, writes of the “deep melancholy” she feels as she struggles to ensure the survival of this iconic tree. And yet despite this, she finds a glimmer of hope in the darkness: “still our languages, costumes, traditions and bitter barks thrive in a world that persists in forgetting humanity’s strong connection with our environment.” Bragg’s other fixture was the lively radio programme Start the Week – that is, until his friend Tony Blair elevated him to the House of Lords in 1998. ‘They decided when I went to the Lords I couldn’t do Start the Week any more because it would be imperilling my impartiality,’ he says with drawling amusement. ‘I was given a six-month contract to keep me quiet. That became In Our Time. I only got the job because I was fired.’ This is the tale of a boy who lived in a pub and expected to leave school at fifteen yet won a scholarship to Oxford. Derailed by a severe breakdown when he was thirteen, he developed a passion for reading and study – though that didn’t stop him playing in a skiffle band or falling in love.

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The protagonist of Sheena Patel’s corrosive, brilliant debut, a 30-year-old arts freelancer living in south London, is fanatical about two individuals: “the man I want to be with” and “the woman I am obsessed with”, who is also having an affair with “the man I want to be with”. The protagonist’s relationship with “the man I want to be with”, a highly esteemed artist, started off with a fan letter she sent him. Years later, she still cannot extricate herself from the asymmetrical affair that has developed – one in which she wants him enough to obliterate most other aspects of her life, and he holds her at arm’s length. The book details his life, from his birth to the point at which, compulsory national service having at last been ditched, he’s about to go off to Oxford – and detail is the word. What a memory Bragg has for names and faces; he can describe the new furniture in his parents’ living room as if it were all still there, waiting to be dusted by his indefatigable mum. His text has the feeling of an inventory, albeit a highly poetic one. Bragg is 82; the world he wants, and needs, to describe is now all but gone; time is running out. The writing is plain, in the sense that he wants to get things down, but there is something incantatory, here, too, as though some other force than himself was pushing his fingers across his keyboard. What makes one man succeed and another fail? What is learning for, and why is it better – of any more use – than stoicism and hard work?

There were so many hours to fill in each day without computers, mobile phones or TV. Walking, cycling, singing, dances, swimming, rugby all played a part in developing MB’s character and still left many hours free for study.

Bonarjee fell in love while at Aberystwyth, but after a three-year secret engagement her fiancé called it off when his parents told him, “She is very beautiful and intelligent but she is Indian”. According to her niece: “It destroyed her; she was distraught.” As Whitehead notes, “while Dorothy may have relished being an outsider, there could be a painful price to pay for being different”. She wrote about the experience in her poem “Renunciation” (1919), which begins: “So I must give thee up – not with the glow / Of those who losing much yet rather gain. / But losing all.” Le Guin constantly comes at things from new directions: championing abortion in a short devastating piece about life before Roe v Wade as a way of saving the children you do want to have; exploring how men have “let themselves be silenced” by eschewing the “mother tongue” of conversation and story for the “father tongue” of power and politics; contrasting Virginia Woolf’s fertile influence on 20th-century literature with the “dead end” of Ulysses. This is a brilliantly written account of the Ottoman empire in all its opulence and brutality. Rich in colourful historical anecdotes, de Bellaigue brings 16th-century statecraft vividly alive, and offers a chilling insight into the ruthlessness and loneliness of one of the most powerful men of the age. The best thing he's ever written . . . What a world he captures here. You can almost smell it' Rachel Cooke, Observer

An extraordinary work - eloquent, charming, insightful, vivid, touching, and a true work of literature— Tony Palmer Suleyman became sultan in 1520, after the death of his father, Selim. Utterly ruthless in the pursuit of power, Selim had killed his brothers and nephews to gain control of the Ottoman Empire. He even tried to murder his own son with a poisoned robe. Suleyman was saved by his mother, who warned him just in time. An unfortunate servant who tried it on died instead. This is the tale of a boy who lived in a pub and expected to leave school at fifteen yet won a scholarship to Oxford. Derailed by a severe breakdown when he was thirteen, he developed a passion for reading and study - though that didn't stop him playing in a skiffle band or falling in love. Now well into his stride, Bragg is incensed (he calls it ‘dismayed’) by Michael Grade’s recent appointment as head of Ofcom, the communications regulator. ‘He has declared publicly on several occasions that the licence fee is past its sell-by date. And he is a Tory lord, an absolute whipped Tory lord, a Tory mouthpiece. How can they give it to a man as biased as that?’ I feel like I know every nook and cranny, every little alleyway and footpath in Wigton yet I have never been to Cumbria let alone that town.In this elegiac and heartfelt memoir, Melvyn Bragg recreates his youth in the Cumbrian market town of Wigton: a working-class boy who expected to leave school at fifteen yet who gained a scholarship to Oxford University; who happily roamed the streets and raided orchards with his gang of friends until a breakdown in adolescence drove him to find refuge in books. Disarmingly poignant . . . In other hands this tale would easily be the stuff of cliché, except that Bragg fills every memory and anecdote with both meaning and feeling . . . He has written some 40 books and this lovely memoir is surely the most affecting of them all.— Michael Prodger, New Statesman Why did it catch on? Baffles me. It just did,’ Bragg says. ‘For a lot of people it’s a sort of education. For me, it’s all the things I want to learn about.’ The seminar format is simple: Bragg rounds up three academics, ‘the best people around’, and gets them to distil and thrash out their subject in a way that lesser mortals can understand. ‘We are never knowingly relevant,’ he boasts. Everyone seems to have a good time, Bragg especially. ‘One week it’s vampires and the next it’s Homo erectus and away we go! It’s ruined my non-fiction reading.’ You used to help your parents in the pub. Can you still pull a decent pint? And how is your darts game? I’d have got into local government or gone down to the factory and worked in its accounts department or been a junior clerk.