BACK IN THE DAY

Melvyn Bragg

Sceptre £25

Bragg’s (above) poignant memoir about growing up in the Cumbrian market town of Wigton evokes a lost world of workingclass life – a world of outside loos, oncea-week baths and pubs murky with fag smoke. He recalls rites of passage such as first love, while also telling the story of how a lad who could have left school at 15 and worked in a factory ended up going to Oxford.