Bøger af Richard Cobb

I've always felt that autobiographies were reserved for the ridiculously famous types in this world like The Rock, Bruce Springsteen or one of the immemorable ones from Blue. Writing an autobiography seemed as elusive as getting a blue tick on Twitter. If you're not famous, off you pop- come back when you've been on Love Island. I'm not famous. You've probably never heard of me. If you have, I'm not the romantic pianist or the sarcastic murderer of the same name (Google it.) I haven't really done that much of note the last thirty years. With that in mind, I decided to write an autobiography. I used to love posting nonsense on social media about burning toast or faking injury at the gym three seconds into a failed treadmill session. Two days and two likes later (one from my Grandma) these stories would be forgotten about. Everyone has pointless anecdotes that they wish they would remember outside the one dimensional airbrushed wall of their Facebook page, but it's basically become a disposable tool, with many of these stories disappearing into the abyss. If I ever have kids, I'd want them to read about the tin of beans incident in West Linton, video shop culture, the time I threw up on my sister, my numerous failed attempts at love and the time I got a bollocking from the Home Economics teacher that looked like Big Bird from Sesame Street. I'd also like others to share my pain of having to wear tracksuits, partake in country dancing at school and listen to Steps as a youngster growing up in the '90s. "Everyone should buy his book." Nick Cave.

Like Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson, Richard Cobb had a gift for understanding great historic events in terms of ordinary human relations. Here for the first time Cobb's widely admired chronicles of daily life in Revolutionary France are gathered into one volume with an illuminating introduction by his former pupil, historian David Gilmour.

A Classical Education was first published in 1985. It followed immediately after Still Life and is again autobiographical though of a somewhat more macabre hue. At the centre is a murder committed by a school friend of Richard Cobb's.'What gives A Classical Education its fascination is the author's description of how he himself, a shy and introverted schoolboy from Tunbridge Wells, is drawn into a nightmarish melodrama from which it seems he was lucky to escape... this book is beautifully written'. Richard Ingrams, The Times

Still Life: Sketches from a Tunbridge Wells Childhood (the sub-title is important) was first published in 1984. It won the J.R. Ackerley Prize for Literary Biography in that year. It is a classic among middle-class memoirs. In twenty-one short chapters the town is vividly anatomized. So too are its residents: meet Dr Ranking and, best of all, meet the Limbury-Buses living a life of contented ossification.'Cobb remembers, and that, as well as his redeeming freedom from all conventional standards of dignity and relevance, is what makes this offbeat, capricious book a rare treasure'. John Carey, Sunday Times 'A remarkable feat of making purest autobiography part of a general, social history... Cobb has broken one of the strangest silences in English social commentary; on the missing history of the English bourgeoisie'. Michael Neve, Times Literary Supplement

Richard Cobb (1919-96) CBE was a British historian and essayist, and professor at the University of Oxford. He was the author of numerous influential works about the history of France, particularly the French Revolution.