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.’ This is not the kind of relationship where the players remain wilfully ignorant of its caustic nature. The protagonist faces into the flames. She tells herself: “By the fact of his gender you are fundamentally dismissed and because you are asking for his vulnerability, you become the enemy, you are treated as a hostile invader, with suspicion, surveyed as a constant high-level threat and you will be suppressed or defeated.” It sets up a familiar kind of power dynamic, one established along gender lines. To prevent the awful possibility of his own debasement, “the man I want to be with” – serially unfaithful, far older than the protagonist – requires that she submit to him, that she remains nothing more than a vessel through which his own agency can flow. A handful of his oldest friends were in church, too. A choir of six sang an anthem written by the composer Howard Goodall, who also adapted, for the organ, music from The Hired Man, the musical he wrote in 1984 from the first of Bragg’s Cumbrian trilogy novels. ‘Someone getting married at 80 in such a place and with such a small number of people, was always going to be an emotional thing,’ says Goodall. ‘And it was.’ Bragg himself says: ‘It was difficult and wonderful at the same time.’ I’d have got into local government or gone down to the factory and worked in its accounts department or been a junior clerk. 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.

Now well into his stride, Bragg is incensed (he calls it ‘dismayed’) by Michael Grade’s recent appointment as head of Ofcom, the communications regulator. ‘He has declared publicly on several occasions that the licence fee is past its sell-by date. And he is a Tory lord, an absolute whipped Tory lord, a Tory mouthpiece. How can they give it to a man as biased as that?’ As I grow older,” writes Melvyn Bragg, “I look for answers in memory rather than research”. In this touching memoir, Bragg recalls growing up in the Cumbrian market town of Wigton in north-west England, that lies between the Lake District and the Solway Plain, just south of Hadrian’s Wall: “the High Street had been established by Norsemen over a thousand years ago”. The alarm was raised by the town’s chemist, Fred Davies. His daughter was married to a rival solicitor, Oswald Martin. When Martin suddenly fell ill with violent vomiting and diarrhoea after being invited for tea and scones at Armstrong’s house in October 1921, the chemist became suspicious. Fred had sold Armstrong arsenic to use as weedkiller just before his wife died in February. She had suffered from similar symptoms. 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.”Bragg’s other fixture was the lively radio programme Start the Week – that is, until his friend Tony Blair elevated him to the House of Lords in 1998. ‘They decided when I went to the Lords I couldn’t do Start the Week any more because it would be imperilling my impartiality,’ he says with drawling amusement. ‘I was given a six-month contract to keep me quiet. That became In Our Time. I only got the job because I was fired.’

Melvyn Bragg is a broadcasting legend and an accomplished novelist but this is his finest work and an instant classic. It's an affecting and evocative account of his working-class upbringing in the small Cumbrian market town of Wigton and a vivid Cider With Rosie-style portrait of a particular place and time.— Best Summer Reads, Mail on Sunday Sheila Watt-Cloutier, a member of the Inuit community in Quebec, Canada, writes that “in our language we have no word for ‘nature’, despite our deep affinity with the land, which teaches us how to live in harmony with the natural world.” The Western worldview set “man” and “nature” against each other, seeing the natural realm as something to be conquered, whereas Inuit “place themselves within, not apart from, nature”. Climate change directly threatens the traditional Inuit way of life and indeed the Arctic home of Watt-Cloutier’s people. In this moving essay, she calls for a profound reimagining of our attitude to nature: “Indigenous wisdom is the medicine we seek in healing our planet and creating a sustainable world.” I could have done things which helped and I did things which harmed,’ Bragg told The Guardian in 1998. ‘So yes, I feel guilt, I feel remorse.’ The tragedy overshadowed the lives of both father and daughter, but also created a deep bond between them. Melvyn Bragg – long-serving host of The South Bank Show and In Our Time, raised to the nobility by Tony Blair – has long been viewed as panjandrum-in-chief of the chattering classes. But he has never let himself, nor anyone else, forget that he hails from an ordinary rural town in Cumbria. Wigton is as essential to his humble northern origin story as Leeds is to Alan Bennett or Wakefield was to David Storey.

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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 was a slow burn to start with, but became totally engrossed in the teenage years of Melvyn Bragg’s life. There were so many hours to fill in each day without computers, mobile phones or TV. Walking, cycling, singing, dances, swimming, rugby all played a part in developing MB’s character and still left many hours free for study.

Other sections, mostly near the end, I liked a lot too. Christmas and New Year’s town traditions are evocatively described. There is a bit about hounds that caught my attention too. I like very much the entire section about the teachers who helped him attain a higher education. There arises a conflict between the wishes of his parents and the possibility of his continuing his studies. My heart was pounding. I needed to know how this would be resolved. This was very suspenseful! Melvyn Bragg's first ever memoir -- an elegiac, intimate account of growing up in post-war Cumbria, which lyrically evokes a vanished world. A wonderful memoir . . . a truly great book about what it means to come from somewhere, to be of a culture, to be cultured not in the rarest but the most communal sense.— Howard Jacobson As a youngster Bragg’s interests were those of many a young lad. The games he played and the sports he took part in meant little to me. Being a member of different teams, he and they of course aimed to win. I personally am not a competitive person. For me, doing a sport, physical exercise or any other activity is done simply for the fun of doing it, not for coming in first.In what he admits is a personal interpretation of the deep past, he has written a wonderfully rich popularisation of his specialism. It is an immensely impressive attempt to use imagination to bring scientific research into the deep history of our planet vividly alive, mentally stripping away the hedgerows, buildings and infrastructure of human urban civilization, to reveal the much older and stranger landscapes that once existed. 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. In 1994, Bragg interviewed the dying dramatist Dennis Potter, an encounter no one watching the night it was broadcast on Channel 4 could forget. Potter needed to take gulps of liquid morphine to get through it and yet, with Bragg handing him the medication, spoke about his heightened awareness of the wonder and freshness of the blossoming world outside his window. 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.