Book description
Hoxton today is one of the most fashionable parts of inner London,
yet before the Blitz, it was the capital's most notorious slum area.
It was London's busiest market for stolen goods, the centre of the
pickpocket trade, home to a razor gang that terrorised racecourses all
over southern England. Its main thoroughfare, Hoxton Street, was known
also as the roughest street in Britain.
But among the people born there in its heyday was Bryan Magee,
journalist, academic, philosopher, radio and television broadcaster
and Member of Parliament. For him it was home, for his first nine
years, until he became an evacuee on the outbreak of war. In this
moving and beautifully written book he recalls the vanished world of
his childhood and brings it to life again in all its drama and surprise.
Bryan Magee has had a many-sided career. In the 1960s and 70s he
worked in broadcasting, as a current affairs reporter on ITV and a
critic of the arts on BBC Radio 3. At one time he taught philosophy at
Oxford, where he was a tutor at Balliol College. His best remembered
television programmes are two long series about philosophy: for the
first he was awarded the Silver Medal of the Royal Television Society,
while the book he based on the second was a bestseller. From 1974 to
1983 he was Member of Parliament for Leyton, first as Labour, then as a
Social Democrat. He is now a full-time author and this book is his
twentieth. The others have been translated, altogether, into more than
20 languages.
