A Sort of Clowning: Life and Times, 1940-59

Widely acclaimed as a masterpiece on its publication in 1988, "A Local Habitation" - the first volume of Richard Hoggart's long-awaited 'life and times'- described his working-class childhood in Leeds, culminating in four years at the city's University. "A Sort of Clowning" opens in 1940, when he joined the Royal Artillery: wartime Britain - traversed and retraversed in blacked-out trains - is vividly evoked, as is active service in North Africa and Italy. The end of hostilities found Richard Hoggart in Naples, editing allied arts magazines and already involved in the world of adult education that was to claim him after his return to England in 1946 and a job teaching in the extra-mural department of Hull University. His work there took him all over North-East England, and the ideals and the vision of those involved are movingly recorded. He was also beginning to make his mark as a writer: his pioneering study of W.H. Auden was followed, in 1957, by publication of "The Uses of Literacy" - a book that not only exerted a profound and radical influence, but made its author a celebrity overnight.

"A Sort of Clowning" leaves him on the verge of the 1960s, and the broader claims of public life. Combining to a remarkable degree action and reflection, family life and the role of the recorder of our period with exact evocations of a troopship, or Eisenhower's America, or the Hull of Philip Larkin, this is a moving, wise, comic and perceptive addition to what promises to be one of the finest autobiographical sequences of our time.