Beer and skittles and Lucian Freud and Quentin Crisp – a Hampstead misery memoir

The rise of the ‘misery memoir’ describing abusive childhoods, followed by the I-was-a-teenage-druggie-alkie-gangbanger-tick-as-appropriate memoir, pushed into the shadows an older tradition, the memoir of childhood pleasure, of charm and humour. Some of the greats — Gwen Raverat’s Period Piece, Diana Holman-Hunt’s My Grandmothers and I — continue to be enjoyed; others every bit as good — Joan Wyndham’s Love Lessons trilogy — must be snapped up secondhand.

Marjorie Ann Watt’s Slideshow never quite reaches these heights, but is nevertheless a welcome addition to this genre. Watts herself is a painter and illustrator, and here she uses words to depict the lost world of the prewar bohemian Hampstead upper-middle-classes. Her father, Arthur Watts, was a Punch cartoonist; her formidable grandmother the founder of PEN.

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Matthew Lynn

The minimum wage is too high

Thus the book is filled with throwaway references to ‘the Blisses’— the composer Arthur and family — or E.M.