My History

The doyenne of the historical biography turns the spotlight on her childhood and early life.


Antonia Fraser's memoir of growing up is not only an attempt to recapture the experiences of her Oxford childhood and youth--in Shakespeare's phrase, to "call back yesterday, bid time return." It is also a chronicle of the progress of her love of history since her first discovery of it as a private pleasure when she was a child in the 1930s--her history, as she believed it to be, for the study of history (as her books subsequently attest) has always been an essential part of the enjoyment of life. When Antonia received as a Christmas present a copy of Our Island Story by H.E. Marshall in… Keep Reading