Episodes - Michael Baxandall

This remarkable account of his early life and imaginative development was left unpublished by Michael Baxandall, one of the world's greatest cultural historians, at his death in 2008.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