Returning to Goldsmiths College after 50 years!

Absolutely delighted to receive this review from Prof Tim Crook of Goldsmiths College, London.

I met Tim recently and, when I mentioned my book and the fact that it had some diary extracts about my time as a Goldsmiths student in the 1960s, he said he would buy and read a copy. But I didn’t expect things to happen so quickly nor for him to write a review – let alone such a glowing one at that!

As well as being the College Historian, Tim has written some very impressive stuff. Most notably, perhaps, he wrote the book from which the recent TV series, Mrs Wilson, was adapted – a true story of a British secret agent and multiple bigamist whose (many) offspring still cannot obtain the truth about his life from the British Intelligence Services.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R3FG3JFS1FMB9D/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1523378816

Customer Review

T. Crook

5.0 out of 5 stars

Fascinating self-analysis of diary writing

21 April 2019

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This is an engaging and fascinating study of the self through the analysis of decades of diary writing. The author, a distinguished Professor of Educational Psychology, presents an original autobiography in the genre of life-writing by reviewing his life and relationships through the evidence of his detailed diaries running to over one and a half million words- three times the length of War and Peace. The approach is self-effacing, honest and with a gentle humour about what he wrote, what he thinks of it now, what he thinks of the person he was (how many multiple personalities do we have in a life-time or even at any one time?) and somewhat crucially in places what he did not write, but so clearly remembers at the time of writing his book. It is brilliantly and evocatively titled ‘The Ragged Weave of Yesterday.’ This delightful title encapsulates all of the chaos, confusion, regrets and delights found in the vaults of personal memory. In Andy Miller’s case this enriched by his library of handwritten volumes. They represent the remarkable discipline and commitment he gave to diary writing; something not many of us have the privilege of consulting and relying on.
Being the historian of Goldsmiths, University of London, where Andy was a student in the tumultuous and iconic late 1960s, his contemporary writing and recollections provide original insights and intriguing testimony on student and university culture more than 50 years ago.

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