Episodes
A Memorybook

This remarkable account of his early life and imaginative development was left unpublished by Michael Baxandall, one of the world's greatest cultural historians, at his death in 2008.

Presenting a mesmerising picture both of British intellectual life in the 1940s and 50s, and at the same time of the mental, emotional and cultural formation of a man destined to transform many aspects of that world over the next forty years, Episodes is both an unputdownably gripping story, and a vividly analytic tour de force.

From early childhood in Cardiff and the valleys of South Wales to school and adolescence in Manchester, followed by study with F.R. Leavis at Cambridge and then in Germany, Italy and Switzerland, the book brilliantly evokes and observes the young man who finally decides not to write novels, but to become a scholar.

Recounting in coruscating detail life and work with John Pope Hennessy at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Baxandall's decision to join Gertrud Bing and Ernst Gombrich at the Warburg Institute at London University Episodes shows how the insights of the extraordinarily learned and original mature scholar were informed and moulded by the boy's enthusiasms, adventures, and rebellions.

Both as a personal testimony, as a spellbinding series of vignettes and characterisations of famous and infamous contemporaries, and as a contribution to the cultural history of the mid-twentieth century, this is an essential and unforgettable book.

Summer evenings were long but one still had to go to bed early, and at my school lights were put out at half past seven. For one summer term at that school, perhaps 1945, I and another trust-worthy senior boy, Donovan (say), had been moved to a dormitory of much younger boys, of whom we were meant to be in charge. The infants soon slept, with whimpers and snorts, and the room was stuffy. One lacked the general after-lights sociability of the normal dormitory of contemporaries, and while relations between Donovan and myself had at one time been warm they had recently become cool. So it was my habit to go down to the lavatories and read for a time. That night I left Donovan noisily sucking on an Oxo cube and went down with a book called, I will insist, The Broad highway.



But before going to the squalid shelter of one of the stalls to read it, I had a look out of the window of the murky shower-room beyond. This window was long and low and partly open, and gave on to what had once been a stable-yard. It was a bright June evening, calm and quietly humming, an evening of the kind that suggests wasting it will forfeit something forever. Living was out there and it seemed unbearable and stupid to be inside in this dark. On an impulse I climbed out through the low window into the yard - easy enough even with dressing-gown and The Broad Highway - and then went quickly to ground in a shrubbery that bordered a little-used back drive.