Richard Perceval Graves is an acclaimed biographer who has now turned the spotlight on his own early life and times. ‘Imperial Dreams (1959-1964)’ is the third of a projected series of five memoirs covering the years from 1945-1968. Each volume is intended to transcend the personal to become a unique social history of those far-off times. With the current volume Richard Graves also provides an authoritative account of life in a famous Public School during the early 1960s. It will be of particular interest to all those who have ever been pupils at Charterhouse.

Here is a vivid description of what it was like to be brought up in those days: how children were educated, the kind of lives they led both at school and at home, the holidays they went on, the books and newspapers that they read, and the television, films and plays that they watched.

Here too are such events as the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover; the Cuba Crisis; the assassination of President Kennedy; the Profumo scandal; his Uncle, Robert Graves, becoming Professor of Poetry at Oxford; Yuri Gagarin becoming the first man in space; and the author’s first experience of watching someone die.