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Hello and welcome to Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Samerith, the literary editor for The Spectator, and I'm very pleased to be joined this week by the writer Jeff Dyer, whose new book is Homework, a Memoir.

Jeff, what made you think now was the time to write a memoir?

Well, I'm in the back of my mind, I guess I had that B.S. Johnson essay or a little book called,

aren't you rather young to be writing your memoirs?

So, you know, I'll be 67 next month.

So I'd been contemplating this since certainly,

oh, and from the time that my parents died in 2011 now, incredible.

And then, yeah, I thought, I think it's a good time to do it in 160s, really.

And it's a story of a Gloucestershire lad yeah sorry it's a slightly not quite Shropshire lad but yeah I'm so to paraphrase Alex Ferguson on um Liverpool you know I thought

it was time to knock Laurie Lee off his perch and is it the record of a happy chartered?

Yes, it is, I think.

Maybe I'd generalise out from that and say less about a childhood than about a happy period in a way of British life. It's the, you know, I'm very much a

beneficiary of the post-war settlement. Yeah, it was a sort of good time in British life, I think. And then

that, I mean, it gets worse in the 70s, but in the late 70s, of course.

But yeah, it's a happy time.

You say the post-war settlement, you're a bit younger than I am.

And what's striking to me was the extent to which the war is absolutely sort of suffusing your cultural life as a boy.

...