Still Life: Sketches From A Tunbridge Wells Childhood
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In the quiet, leafy streets of interwar Tunbridge Wells, a world of rigid social codes, suburban rituals, and half-spoken truths unfolds with extraordinary intimacy in Richard Cobb's Still Life: Sketches from a Tunbridge Wells Childhood. This memoir-in-miniature chronicles the historian's early years with the precision of a Dutch master, painting a portrait of English provincial life — its eccentrics, its silences, and its peculiarly English brand of genteel melancholy — through a series of finely observed vignettes that read as much as social history as personal reminiscence. Cobb, renowned as one of Britain's greatest historians of France, here turns his forensic eye inward, applying the same rigorous attention to detail and atmospheric reconstruction that distinguished his academic work to the textures of his own childhood. The result is a work of rare literary distinction — tender yet unsentimental, nostalgic yet sharply analytical — that illuminates how the microcosm of a single English town can hold within it the full complexity of a vanished era. For those who treasure the art of memory and the finely wrought English essay, Still Life poses an irresistible question: how much of who we are is shaped by the world we can barely remember?
Author: Richard Cobb
Format: Paperback
Published: 1983, Chatto & Windus
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In the quiet, leafy streets of interwar Tunbridge Wells, a world of rigid social codes, suburban rituals, and half-spoken truths unfolds with extraordinary intimacy in Richard Cobb's Still Life: Sketches from a Tunbridge Wells Childhood. This memoir-in-miniature chronicles the historian's early years with the precision of a Dutch master, painting a portrait of English provincial life — its eccentrics, its silences, and its peculiarly English brand of genteel melancholy — through a series of finely observed vignettes that read as much as social history as personal reminiscence. Cobb, renowned as one of Britain's greatest historians of France, here turns his forensic eye inward, applying the same rigorous attention to detail and atmospheric reconstruction that distinguished his academic work to the textures of his own childhood. The result is a work of rare literary distinction — tender yet unsentimental, nostalgic yet sharply analytical — that illuminates how the microcosm of a single English town can hold within it the full complexity of a vanished era. For those who treasure the art of memory and the finely wrought English essay, Still Life poses an irresistible question: how much of who we are is shaped by the world we can barely remember?