Germs: A Memoir Of Childhood - Softcover

"'A frighteningly good memoir'" (Andrew O'Hagan 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'" (Diana Athill Literary Review)

"'Germs is not only elegantly written; it is a human document of considerable power and importance'" (John Armstrong Independent)

"'Pungently truthful, complex and original'" (Alan Hollinghurst 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)

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.