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

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Bragg says “This is about my life from the age of six to 18 in the middle of the last century at a time which now seems like another country. A charming account of a lost era, full of details and often lyrical descriptions of people and places . Melvyn Bragg's first memoir is outstanding - beautifully written -a book that reflects the importance of family life, education, the importance of inspiring teachers, the growth of relationships and the importance of belonging to a sense of place. Be aware that this is written about, although it doesn’t cover many pages, if this would be a trigger. 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.This wonderfully authentic and often moving account of Bragg's childhood up to the time he leaves for university, is a heartfelt celebration of family life in a working-class community during the 1940s and 50s. The first thing to say is that this memoir is keenly drawn, but it is not restricted to a cinematic re-telling. 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. I am biased: I have lived in Wigton since 1992 and taught for 26 years at the very school that Melvyn attended.

Cast loose from my own town of birth at 18, I responded emotionally to the portrait painted here of my adopted home, as seen through the loving but clear eyes of someone who went out into the wider world but never really left. 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. The awkwardnesses of his understanding with his father, with whom so much had to be left unsaid given the nature of male emotional life in the 1940s and 1950s and the character of Stan himself, emerge very strongly. Please Note: By their very nature, all signed books will have been handled several times before they get to you. This story was beautifully and respectfully written and read by an at times deeply emotional Melvyn Bragg.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. Melvyn Bragg's first ever memoir - an elegiac, intimate account of growing up in post-war Cumbria, which vividly evokes a vanished world. 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. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer View image in fullscreen ‘Pulling pints is a little knack’: Melvyn Bragg photographed in London, February 2023. I loved the story about falling in love with Sarah and their sexual explorations, fear of pregnancy which is so familiar to people of that generation.

One can compare Bragg with Karl Sagan - due both promoters of knowledge innate curiosity, extreme diligence and preparation as well as ability to poignantly uncover powerful truths with simple questions.It's a rare thing to read about, especially these days, and that made the story all the more valuable and enjoyable. 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,.

Registered office address: Unit 34 Vulcan House Business Centre, Vulcan Road, Leicester, Leicestershire, LE5 3EF. His respect for the community is palpable, the respect for those around his deeply respectful and the respect for his parents is truly borne out of deep love for two people who sacrificed themselves for him.His books have also been awarded the Time/Life Silver Pen Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the WHSmith Literary Award, and have been longlisted three times for the Booker Prize (including the Lost Man Booker Prize). View image in fullscreen King Street in Wigton circa 1955: ‘Bragg was almost paralysingly reluctant to leave Cumbria’. 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. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This may result in small marks to the dustjacket and title page, please also bear in mind that each signature will be a little different from the one we show here.