Clever Girl: Growing Up in the 1950s - Softcover

A touching, comic masterpiece of a memoir. -- Melanie McGrath * Sunday Telegraph * A wonderful book, by turns heartbreaking and deliriously funny. -- Diana Melly * Sunday Times * Deft and humorous... [Brian Thompson has] an Alan Bennett-like ear for the incongruous. -- Joan Bakewell * Guardian * Clever Girl is the panacea to all those misery memoirs choking the nation's bookstores. -- Ludovic Hunter-Tilney * Financial Times * An enchantingly eccentric and entertaining book. -- Tom Rosenthal * Daily Mail * Brian Thompson can write... he is in a different league. -- Tom Payne * Daily Telegraph * 'Beautifully written, very funny.' -- Steven Poole * Guardian *

Longlisted for The Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2007 Brian Thompson never had to look very hard for trouble. His unorthodox childhood and his eccentric parents guaranteed that. But when, aged eighteen, Brian left home he was determined to enjoy a life of unstinting ordinariness, taking advantage of a Britain that would 'never have it so good'. National Service led to foreign travel to Kenya, skirmishes with the Mau Mau and a request to fix the results of his platoon sergeant's English exam, one Idi Amin. Even when Brian was safe on English soil he was still confounded in his ambition to lead a quiet life. His limp attempt at University entrance - a single letter on some stolen NAAFI headed paper - led to admittance to Trinity College Cambridge and the niceties of middle class student life. And then there was rock and roll. And girls. Suitably confused, Brian did what was considered to be the right thing. He married the Clever Girl.