Germs: A Memoir Of Childhood

Description

'Destined to become a classic' - Francis Wyndham The son of affluent parents - a distant, dandified impresario father he revered; a beautiful, mindless 'Gaiety Girl' mother he came to regret loathing - Richard Wollheim grew up in the English suburbia of the 1920s and 1930s. Germs is his account of those years. It is a book like no other; a remarkable exploration of childhood by one of the English-speaking world's most distinguished postwar thinkers.

Richard Wollheim was born in London in 1923 and educated at Westminster School and Balliol College, Oxford. He served in the army during the Second World War, seeing action in France and Germany. From 1949, Wollheim taught philosophy at University College London, becoming, in 1963, Grote Professor of Mind and Logic. He retired from UCL in 1982, and from then until 1985 was Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. Between 1985 and 2003 he was professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1989 until 1996, he was also Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at the University of California, Davis. Wollheim was the author of many acclaimed works of philosophy and a novel, A Family Romance. He died in 2003.

'A frighteningly good memoir' * London Review of Books * 'Wollheim's powers of description astound...Because of the intensity with which a remarkable man has offered us a view of his inner self, I doubt whether anyone who has read it will forget it' * Literary Review * 'Germs is not only elegantly written; it is a human document of considerable power and importance' * Independent * 'Pungently truthful, complex and original' * Guardian * 'A masterpiece - an unclassifiable work of startling originality in which the acutely sensual and confusedly cerebral experience of infancy, boyhood and adolescence is brilliantly recreated' * Spectator *