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

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He is also a Vice President of the Friends of the British Library, a charity set up to provide funding support to the British Library. A charming account of a lost era, full of details and often lyrical descriptions of people and places . What we get instead is a richly described and explored evolution of his own interior emotional and mental life. Bragg is ten years my senior so his experiences of growing up in the war years, and being a teenager in the 50s were relatable, especially as my brothers were that much older than me.

Then chapters on playing football in the park (Kensington Gardens for us), holidays at home, books (Biggles, Jennings and Just William.I’d have got into local government or gone down to the factory and worked in its accounts department or been a junior clerk. But those who have no knowledge of Wigton will still be moved and entertained by the books’ depiction of a northern community in the 40s and 50s, and the development within it of an important figure in the cultural life of this country. This probably doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that should have a critic gently weeping on the number 38, and what’s strange is that, in the context of Back in the Day, it’s not even close to being the most sweet-sad detail; Bragg’s book, the best thing he has ever written, imbues the overused literary adjective “piercing” with real meaning. I was walking down Walton Street and saw this big poster that had the spitting image of my girlfriend on it. It was, and is, his place, and I wonder if this doesn’t seem to him now like the greatest luck of his life: a better thing by far than all the TV shows, the fame and the money and the peerage.

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. Please Note: By their very nature, all signed books will have been handled several times before they get to you. 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.

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. For me, doing a sport, physical exercise or any other activity is done simply for the fun of doing it, not for coming in first. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. This leading to an entrance exam and interview for Queens College, Oxford, with an offer for a scholarship after his National Service. 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 .

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