Fear in a handful of dust

Richard Wollheim died last year, aged 80, after a distinguished academic career as a philosopher fascinated by aesthetics and psychoanalysis. He had recently completed this memoir of his childhood. Posthumous publication reveals it to be a masterpiece — an unclassifiable work of startling originality in which the acutely sensual and confusedly cerebral experience of infancy, boyhood and adolescence is brilliantly recreated. Although it carries self-scrutiny to an extreme of scrupulous candour which I believe to be unique, the term ‘confessional’ — with its suggestion of apology and therapeutic exhibitionism — does not apply. There is little sense here of personal secrets being exposed to public view, but rather of the reader being intimately drawn into the heart of a deeply private life.

This life, of course, had its social dimension and the author’s family and background provide a milieu of peculiar interest. His father, Eric Wollheim, was a cosmopolitan impresario with glamorous connections (Diaghilev, Kurt Weil, belle époque courtesans and Viennese divas) as well as involvement with the worlds of music hall, pantomime and palatial pubs.