As a result, he grew up knowing people from those settings, as well as school and Scouts, swimming and all his other childhood activities. I feel like I know every nook and cranny, every little alleyway and footpath in Wigton yet I have never been to Cumbria let alone that town.

His mother, Ethel, was illegitimate, fostered by “a Victorian matriarch” whom Bragg believed to be his grandmother until long after she died.

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. His new memoir, Back in the Day, focuses on his early life and is a remarkable portrait of a childhood and adolescence, a family and a community. A greater part of the marks were given to the interview process rather than the exam results, thereby ensuring that intake was very much skewed in favour of public school pupils who would have had much broader life experience as the sons and daughters of wealthy parents. He discovers the enjoyment that can be found in books, in reading and studying and analyzing what he personally draws from a given author’s writing. This is a really good book and especially good that the author is narrating himself, there are times when he is clearly very emotional and this adds very much to the impact of the story.

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. My father's mother had pretensions of grandeur while my mother came from a family of miners and steelworkers. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer View image in fullscreen ‘Pulling pints is a little knack’: Melvyn Bragg photographed in London, February 2023. 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.

It covers Melvyn Bragg’s early years alone with his mother while his father fought in the war, the chronic breakdown he experienced when he was 13 and the love of books that saved him, the joys of first romance, and his journey to winning a scholarship at Oxford to study Modern History. I didn’t want the story to end and felt the emotion as the narrator said a farewell (but not a final goodbye) to Wigton. Wigton's streets become soot-streaked theatre for a huge cast of town characters for whom the author shows a convincing, rather than patronising, affection .