Overview

'The best childhood memoir I know' - Jonathan Mirsky, Spectator Hoxton today is one of the most fashionable parts of inner London, yet before the Blitz, it was the capital's most notorious slum area. It was London's busiest market for stolen goods, the centre of the pickpocket trade, home to a razor gang that terrorised racecourses all over southern England. Its main thoroughfare, Hoxton Street, was known also as the roughest street in Britain. But among the people born there in its heyday was Bryan Magee, journalist, academic, philosopher, radio and television broadcaster and Member of Parliament. For him it was home, for his first nine years, until he became an evacuee on the outbreak of war. In this moving and beautifully written book he recalls the vanished world of his childhood and brings it to life again in all its drama and surprise.

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9780712635608

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Reviews

There are times when all the reviewer needs to write is Read it, love it! -- Arnold Wesker * Guardian * Marvellous...riveting...it hits you with a shock of recognition -- Libby Purves * Midweek * A complex and compelling evocation of a vanished world * Observer * A lovingly detailed verbal map... This is vivid and highly scrupulous autobiographical reportage * Financial Times * Next volume, please * Sunday Times *

Next volume, please * Sunday Times * A lovingly detailed verbal map... This is vivid and highly scrupulous autobiographical reportage * Financial Times * A complex and compelling evocation of a vanished world * Observer * Marvellous...riveting...it hits you with a shock of recognition -- Libby Purves * Midweek * There are times when all the reviewer needs to write is Read it, love it! -- Arnold Wesker * Guardian *

There are times when all the reviewer needs to write is Read it, love it! -- Arnold Wesker Guardian Marvellous...riveting...it hits you with a shock of recognition -- Libby Purves Midweek A complex and compelling evocation of a vanished world Observer A lovingly detailed verbal map... This is vivid and highly scrupulous autobiographical reportage Financial Times Next volume, please Sunday Times

Author Information

Bryan Magee has had a many-sided career. In the 1960s and 70s he worked in broadcasting, as a current affairs reporter on ITV and a critic of the arts on BBC Radio 3. At one time he taught philosophy at Oxford, where he was a tutor at Balliol College. His best remembered television programmes are two long series about philosophy- for the first he was awarded the Silver Medal of the Royal Television Society, while the book he based on the second was a bestseller. From 1974 to 1983 he was Member of Parliament for Leyton, first as Labour, then as a Social Democrat. He is now a full-time author and this book is his twentieth. The others have been translated, altogether, into more than 20 languages.

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