Period piece - Gwen Raverat

'A drawing of the world when I was young.'

So Gwen Raverat, the grand-daughter of Charles Darwin, described Period Piece, her classic memoir of a Cambridge childhood, which since its initial publication in 1952 has never been out of print. Vividly evoking a bygone era, it is a shrewd, touching and comic portrait of her eccentric relations, and of Cambridge society in a time when it was restricted enough to be treated as an extension of the family. As a child she thought it impossible that she would ever succeed as an artist, and yet the observations of the small incidents in her life, recorded here both in word and drawing, reveal an artist's careful eye.