Haunted by hunting

This is an ambitious book. Andrew Motion set out to write a memoir of his childhood but not from the standpoint, and distance, of a grown-up looking back; he set out to write it in the character of a child and teenager living through his experiences. The result can be startling.

Of his father, a third-generation brewer and a colonel in the TA (a rank he used in private life), he says: ‘every time my dad said “Surrey” he made a tsk noise, because he’d once met someone from Esher who wore a Gannex coat like Mr Wilson’. In other words, Motion Senior was a hair-raising snob. The county of Surrey was written off because of one man’s mac. His son makes no comment of any kind. You don’t when you are 16.

So this is a family memoir where the grown-ups, especially his parents, come and go in a haze of acceptance, for Motion has chosen to write from a time before rebellion.