The really fascinating part is the portrait of Wigtown, his Cumbrian home town that was such a tight community,; his family were right at the heart of this, as his parents ran a pub, and were active in the local Labour Party and in sporting activities.

I feel his narration at times was like we were sat together in the same room talking of old times in Wigton. I think he was fortunate in being an only child in some ways because his parents were able to support his choices whereas they might not have been able to if there were a handful of other kids to care for. This is also particularly interesting for me being from Wigton myself, knowing the author and many of the characters mentioned, as well as all the backstreets and lanes of Wigton, and what it is to be from the town. Melvyn is someone to admire and is always interesting to listen to, and there are many fascinating vignettes in this, but there's also a lot of direct speech which feels a bit hard to credit, and a lot of Romantic place-focused stuff which I found a bit dull.It covers Melvyn Bragg’s early years alone with his mother while his father fought in the war, the chronic breakdown he experienced when he was 13 and the love of books that saved him, the joys of first romance, and his journey to winning a scholarship at Oxford to study Modern History. What this means is that it is too easy for a beautiful turn or words, a truth, or comment to blend in to the flow.

His years in the 6th form, his first love, and how he got to Oxford, or nearly didn't, rivetting stuff. We work closely with publishers and authors to ensure that we offer the best books on the market for your child.At her 90th birthday lunch, Melvyn Bragg’s mother turned to her best friend and said, so loudly that everyone could hear: “I always wanted a girl. Melvyn Bragg, Baron Bragg, FRSL, FRTS (born 6 October 1939) is an English author, broadcaster and media personality who, aside from his many literary endeavours, is perhaps most recognised for his work on The South Bank Show. Bragg indelibly portrays his parents and local characters from pub regulars to vicars, teachers and hardmen, and vividly captures the community-spirited northern town -- steeped in the old ways but on the cusp of post-war change. Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages.

It ends with him winning a Scholarship to Oxford University ,but as he so eloquently points out he had to go but he never left his home town of Wigton . Most people are too weary, and too broke, to be happy in an unbridled way: every home has at least one lodger; every house has a thousand jobs that need doing. Though he’d long since moved away from the town – first to Oxford, and then to London – he had never really left it. 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. As we might expect from his previous writings, his deep rootedness in, and love of Wigton, the place of his upbringing, plays a huge role in the book, as does his relationship with his parents, Ethel and Stan, to whom he plays a loving but sharp-eyed tribute.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. 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. Above all, however, it is a warm look back on a life flavoured with the realities of life in England’s north-west and of a hard working student’s pathway towards academic success.