A Childhood in Hoxton

Clouds Of Glory

'The best childhood memoir I know' - Jonathan Mirsky, Spectator

There are times when all the reviewer needs to write is "Read it, love it!"

Marvellous...riveting...it hits you with a shock of recognition

A complex and compelling evocation of a vanished world

A lovingly detailed verbal map... This is vivid and highly scrupulous autobiographical reportage

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.

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.

Wagner and Philosophy

Bryan Magee has had a distinguished and varied career as scholar, broadcaster and parliamentarian. His previous books include Aspects of Wagner (1968), On Blindness (with Martin Milligan, 1996), The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (1997) and Confessions of a Philosopher (1997). He was a Labour MP from 1974 until joining the SDP in 1982.

Wagner was one of the few major composers who studied philosophy seriously. Bryan Magee places the composer's artistic development in the context of the philosophy of his age, and gives us the first detailed and comprehensive study of the close links between Wagner and the philosophers - from the pre-Marxist socialists to Feuerbach and Schopenhauer. Magee explores the relationship between words and music, between the conscious and the unconscious mind, between art and philosophy. It tackles soberly and judiciously the Wagner whose paranoia, egocentricity and anti-semitism are repugnant, as well as the Wagner of artistic genius. The resulting text illuminates Wagner and the music-dramas in altogether new ways.

Bryan Magee

Magee is a man of many parts. But his star role, as he triumphantly demonstrates again and again here, is that of autobiographer

Magee has been fascinated by life as it is lived by himself and others. Here he writes vividly

Social history that brings to life a very different world

It is the vividness of his recall, his feel for emotion and ability to pinpoint people and place that make this such a compelling read

This utterely compelling memoir opens with a sceptical nine-year-old Bryan Magee being taught the facts of life. It goes on to tell the story of the Second World War as seen through a child's eyes. 
 
Growing Up in a War nostalgically evokes the atmostphere of wartime England, the community spirit of a society before television, where very few had cars or telephones. A kid from the East End, he won a scholarship to one of the country's ancient public schools. During the school holidays, he returned to London and the air raids, the doodlebugs and V2 rockets. 
 
With the war over, Bryan's school sent him to a Lycée in Versailles, and he explored the Paris of those post-war years. Then, back in England, he tumbled into his first love affair. The book comes to an end with his call-up into the army, and his unexpected posting to the School of Military Intelligence. 
 
Growing Up in a War is a stunning autobiography and account of Britain during an extraordinary period of history, by the winner of the J.R. Ackerley Prize for autobiography.

Bryan Magee

Praise for Growing Up In A War

Marvellous

Magee is a man of many parts. But his star role, as he triumphantly demonstrates again and again here, is that of autobiographer

A wonderful book

Marvellous

Magee is a man of many parts. But his star role, as he triumphantly demonstrates again and again here, is that of autobiographer

A wonderful book

Marvellous

Magee is a man of many parts. But his star role, as he triumphantly demonstrates again and again here, is that of autobiographer

A wonderful book

Books by Bryan Magee

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