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. What a memory Bragg has for names and faces; he can describe the new furniture in his parents’ living room as if it were all still there, waiting to be dusted by his indefatigable mum. His text has the feeling of an inventory, albeit a highly poetic one. Bragg is 82; the world he wants, and needs, to describe is now all but gone; time is running out. 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. What makes one man succeed and another fail? What is learning for, and why is it better – of any more use – than stoicism and hard work?

Meanwhile, Bragg has kept on writing books – 22 novels and 18 non-fiction works – all of them in longhand. ‘Slow going by the pace of the great Victorian writers,’ he remarks. One of the most outstanding is The Book of Books, about the radical impact of the King James Bible over 400 years. Plenty of people have written about the King James Bible, but I doubt whether anyone has made it so gripping. Wonderfully rich, endearing and unusual . . . a balanced, honest picture' Richard Benson, Mail on Sunday Melvyn Bragg’s first ever memoir – an elegiac, intimate account of growing up in post-war Cumbria, which lyrically evokes a vanished world.Between debilitating assaults on his previously fit person, Bragg got married for the third time, to Gabriel Clare-Hunt, his long-time friend and lover, in 2019. He was three weeks short of his 80th birthday. They first met in 1980 on The South Bank Show. ‘It was the right thing to do,’ he says. ‘I love Gabriel and I felt it would be unfair to her not to get married. I thought, “I’ve had enough of having a mistress.” We thought it would make both of us very happy and it has done.’ 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. I really would have liked to read a bit more about how and why he and Sarah moved apart. About the Author: Melvyn Bragg is a writer and broadcaster whose first novel, For Want of a Nail, was published in 1965. His novels since include The Maid of Buttermere, The Soldier’s Return, A Son of War, Credo and Now is the Time, which won the Parliamentary Book Award for fiction in 2016. 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). He has also written several works of non-fiction, including The Adventure of English and The Book of Books about the King James Bible. He lives in London and Cumbria. But this is more than just an exercise in intellectual curiosity. As Halliday shows, “Earth’s dynamism throughout geological history provides a natural laboratory”. The ecological principles at work in each period remain the same across millennia: “although the cast is different, the play is the same”. From this emerge important lessons that we need to learn at a time when our pollution of the planet is causing the sixth extinction in the long history of our world. Indeed, the fossil record holds a warning for us all, revealing “how fast dominance can become obsolescence and loss”. 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.”

So long as he has the approval of people he respects, Bragg really doesn’t seem to care. ‘The great thing about writing books is writing books,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t do without it. When I finish a book, I start thinking about what I’m going to do next.’ He thinks the BBC is ‘going to take some defending’, though. ‘There’s a lot to admire about what he’s doing at the moment in Ukraine but television is not his strong point. So the fight’s on to keep the BBC.’ Melvyn Bragg's first ever memoir - an elegiac, intimate account of growing up in post-war Cumbria, which vividly evokes a vanished world. His mother Ethel, born on the wrong side of the blanket, bore the inherited shame like a secret stigma. The Oedipal intensity of their bond is not quite a match for Sons and Lovers, but decades later Bragg would discover that she opposed his staying on at school as she knew that way she’d trap him in Wigton. His father Stan, by contrast, unobtrusively urges him to seize the opportunities denied to him. Even he is thrown when Oxford is mentioned. “That’s where the toffs go, Ethel,” he says. The rest is television history. This is the prequel capturing a period of optimism in British life when social mobility suddenly accelerated. The Lion House in Istanbul was once the church of St John. But in the 16th century, its congregation was made up of wildcats, wolves, porcupines, leopards, bears, boars, elephants, and lions. Tended by Moorish keepers, this menagerie was kept for the pleasure of Suleyman the Magnificent, the tenth Sultan of the Ottomans, whose empire stretched from Baghdad to the walls of Vienna.Partly to defuse the emotion, we switch to discussing his time at the BBC. He was one of the first grammar-school boys to get a general traineeship there, and although he spent the biggest and starriest part of his career at ITV, he leads the charge in defence of his alma mater. It’s a fascinating selection, stirring in fictional experiments and personal reflections, and a fittingly playful, diverse tribute to a remarkable spirit and thinker. This is not a book that precisely chronicles the passing of the years; there is barely a single date in evidence. What we get instead is a richly described and explored evolution of his own interior emotional and mental life. Into this perspective flash vividly drawn Wigton characters, such as the unfortunate Andrew, or Melvyn’s main mentor at The Nelson School, Spitfire pilot and then History teacher, Jimmie James (died 2020), to whom he pays a wonderful tribute. This is the tale of a boy who lived in a pub and expected to leave school at fifteen yet won a scholarship to Oxford. Derailed by a severe breakdown when he was thirteen, he developed a passion for reading and study - though that didn't stop him playing in a skiffle band or falling in love.

This is a brilliantly written account of the Ottoman empire in all its opulence and brutality. Rich in colourful historical anecdotes, de Bellaigue brings 16th-century statecraft vividly alive, and offers a chilling insight into the ruthlessness and loneliness of one of the most powerful men of the age. Melvyn Bragg, BBC broadcaster, author and parliamentarian, presents here a memoir of his youth. He was born on October 6, 1939, so, right at the very start of the Second World War. He writes of growing up in the town of Wigton, located in Cumbria, a region in northwestern England of which the beautiful Lake District is part. The book concludes on his having been awarded and having accepted a scholarship to Oxford. As a young boy growing up in rooms above his parents’ pub, we see that what he has achieved is praiseworthy. We look at the how and why of his achievement. We observe where he came from, his parents and family, and the townsfolk he rubbed shoulders with. How his upbringings shaped him and what motivated him are central questions. This is the tale of a boy who lived in a pub and expected to leave school at fifteen yet won a scholarship to Oxford. Derailed by a severe breakdown when he was thirteen, he developed a passion for reading and study -- though that didn't stop him playing in a skiffle band or falling in love. In this captivating memoir, Melvyn Bragg recalls growing up in the Cumbrian market town of Wigton, from his early childhood during the war to the moment he had to decide between staying on or spreading his wings.Bonarjee loved her time at the Welsh seaside town. In 1914 she became the first foreign student and the first woman to win the prestigious College Eisteddfod chair with her poem about the 14th-century Welsh warrior Owain Lawgoch. News of her “chairing” was reported in the Times of India. The college journal, The Dragon, praised her poem’s “imaginative fire” and the award gave her confidence to contribute to other influential publications. She became known, rather inaccurately (her parents were Indian Christians), as the “Hindu Bard”. His parents were working class, but he notes “there was always food on the table, no feeling of poverty”. However, he adds: “no one like us in the 1940s had a fridge, running hot water, a washing-machine, a vacuum-cleaner, a telephone, gramophone, a car, fitted carpets, electricity or central heating.” In a poignant moment, Bragg describes how, when he had the opportunity to stay on in the sixth form, his father supported him, despite his mother’s misgivings: “I realised that he was saying goodbye to what had been his chance: the scholarship not taken up.” He passed his exams with exceptional marks and won a scholarship to Oxford. His parents were astonished. “That’s where the toffs go, Ethel”, said his “discombobulated” father. It even made the Cumberland News: “Wigton Boy Gets Scholarship to Oxford.” Canales, a descendent of the Quechua peoples of Peru, writes of the “deep melancholy” she feels as she struggles to ensure the survival of this iconic tree. And yet despite this, she finds a glimmer of hope in the darkness: “still our languages, costumes, traditions and bitter barks thrive in a world that persists in forgetting humanity’s strong connection with our environment.” But you also studied hard . To what extent did getting into Oxford change your relationship with home?