This memoir of the author’s early years details the advantages of a weirdly dysfunctional family, a mysterious Irish ancestry, a violent and expensive prep school (where he failed to blow up the headmaster with gunpowder), some good teaching – and some very bad – and life as a teenage carer.

Other topics include the dangers of sport and upper-crust drinking dens in Hove, along with a wide range of sometimes bizarre travels: from Sarajevo to East Berlin and Leningrad, and from Erzurum to Ouarzazate, not to mention encounters with pink gin and false teeth in Eastbourne.

It concludes with an account of the author’s four years of university - lived in a style that can no longer be enjoyed, and including the episode that gives this book its title. All these experiences, and many more, have contributed to the formation and direction of his life as a historian.