Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World 

PATRICK JOYCE

(ALLEN LANE, 400 PP, £25)

TABLET BOOKSHOP PRICE £22.50 • TEL 020 7799 4064

In his 2021 memoir, Going to My Father’s House, Patrick Joyce did something unusual for a social historian and turned his academic apparatus on his own life. It is a moving and odd book. Joyce described his intimate experience of transitory worlds, most poignantly the Irish west London of his 1950s childhood and the post-industrial north-west of England where he made his career, but also introduced the voices of the cultural critics who have shaped his intellectual life. It is at once enlightening and alarming for an individual to explain the tenderly rendered details of his youth according to the theories of Seamus Deane or Walter Benjamin.