My history

Antonia Fraser's memoir of growing up has a double meaning. 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.