Clouds of Glory

A Hoxton Childhood

Bryan Magee

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.

First published:: 2003
Published by:: Jonathan Cape
Length:: Hardcover 343 pages

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About the author

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.