Overview

This memoir of the author’s early years details the advantages of a weirdly dysfunctional family, a mysterious Irish ancestry, a violent and expensive prep school (where he failed to blow up the headmaster with gunpowder), some good teaching – and some very bad – and life as a teenage carer. Other topics include the dangers of sport and upper-crust drinking dens in Hove, along with a wide range of sometimes bizarre travels: from Sarajevo to East Berlin and Leningrad, and from Erzurum to Ouarzazate, not to mention encounters with pink gin and false teeth in Eastbourne. It concludes with an account of the author’s four years of university - lived in a style that can no longer be enjoyed, and including the episode that gives this book its title. All these experiences, and many more, have contributed to the formation and direction of his life as a historian.

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9781068465703

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Roger Collins was educated in Eastbourne and Oxford, where he studied Modern History – the period starting in AD 284, which suited him ideally as, by inclination, training, passion and profession, he was and remains primarily a historian of Western Europe between the end of the Roman Empire and the tenth century. He has, however, on occasion, deviated backwards in time to the Neolithic in a study of the Basques and forward to the twenty-first century in a history of the papacy. His scholarly interests, not least in Spanish history, have resulted in the publication of eighteen books, plus another three he edited, and over seventy academic articles of greater or lesser readability. This year he will become the only author to have written three books on the subject of the Chronicle of the Pseudo-Fredegar, a fact unnoticed by the Guinness World Records.

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