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.