D. J. Taylor

My father, the tyrant: Robert Edric describes a brutal upbringing

There has never been a suggestion in Edric’s many novels of what he suffered, but this memoir of parental bullying is a small masterpiece

The 1960s Sheffield of Robert Edric’s childhood. Credit: Alamy 
issue 06 March 2021

In a career stretching back to the mid-1980s, Robert Edric has so far managed a grand total of 28 novels, plus a couple of early efforts under his birth name, G.E. Armitage. I must have read two thirds of this shelf-distending oeuvre, but in none of them have I ever detected the faintest whiff of disguised autobiography.

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