Antonia Fraser’s memoir of growing up has a double purpose. It is partly an attempt to recapture the experiences of her Oxford childhood and youth – in Shakespeare’s phrase, to ‘call back yesterday, bid time return’. But it is also intended as a chronicle of the progress of her love of history since her first discovery of it as a private pleasure when she was a child in the 1930s – her history, as she believed it to be, for the study of history (as her books subsequently attest) has always been an essential part of the enjoyment of life.

Author Antonia Fraser Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson ISBN 9781780227948 EAN 9781780227948 Bic Code Cover Paperback