Philosopher's view of his childhood Vanished world. . . Bryan Magee The title of Bryan Magee's memoir, Clouds of Glory -- A Hoxton Childhood, suggests that it could be the self-indulgent ramblings of a 73-year-old clutching at half-remembered childhood memories seen now through rose-tinted glasses. It is not.

This remarkable work stands firm as a social record of Hoxton, a history which breaths life into one of the areas of East London once considered a slum, now becoming relatively gentrified.

Being a philosopher, he ignores many of the accepted conventions of autobiography. The first few pages carry no descriptions of his family or the house in which he was born. Instead, he discusses the very nature of existence, encouraging the reader to consider the moment when children start being conscious of things outside themselves -- light, space, movement, objects, colours, people -- which fill our consciousness until by degrees we become aware of ourselves as the centre of these experiences.

Only after he has explored this question does he highlight the people, the buildings, the lights and the space which made up the first 11 years of his life in Hoxton and the first world he was to know.

Naturally, other worlds followed: the world of broadcasting, of theatre criticism, television, Oxford, the House of Commons, and authorship. Readers will have to wait to enter those -- there is only room for Hoxton in this book, despite his initial plans to incorporate his teenage years.

He wrote the book at Wolfson College, one of seven Oxford colleges he has been associated with since he first came to Keble as an undergraduate.

He explained: "After working on the first 20 pages or so, I began to realise that if I went on writing in this proportion it would take me 1,000 pages to get to the point where I became 19.

"I was nonplussed -- should I scrap it and write a different version? No. I decided if that was how it was spontaneously coming out, then I would go with the flow, even if it did mean staying with early childhood."

He gradually became as fixated with Hoxton and getting that right as he was about his own childhood memories. "I began to realise that I was becoming as concerned to write about Hoxton as myself. It became not just I, but it. That vanished world which no longer exists -- I wanted to reconstruct it, to bring it back," he said.

By remaining with just the Hoxton years, he managed to keep the page-count down to 343. Even restricting himself to his childhood years, the entire process took two years, and not just because he carefully checked the facts.

The work went slowly because each sentence he writes is painstakingly constructed, changed, rewritten and balanced against the last before he goes on to the next.

"Put me in front of a microphone and the words flow easily, but ask me to write them down and suddenly I am forced to examine each one. Despite having written 20 books, I find writing a painful business, often only finishing 300 words in a day.

"Sir Walter Scott said that easy writing is hard reading. I think that's true. What I believe I am doing is making it easy for the reader by removing all irrelevant words and details."

Until he reached his sixties, he had never really given much thought to his childhood years. "Then gradually I began to think about them, pondering on this and that. Asking myself why did so and so do so and so? Finally, I wanted to write down all those things that had been marinating in my mind for such a long time.

"The strange thing about memories," he continued, "is that it's as if they have little hooks. Pull one out and you find it's attached to another. You remember a shop for example, then the shop next to it, then the particular smell of that shop, the man behind the counter, his friend, his family, and so it goes on. Everything begins to come back, step by step."

Now that Bryan has finished this work and can see his childhood encapsulated within the covers of a book he feels he has unloaded his childhood pain.

"It is a strange experience, nevertheless, for it's you the man writing about you the child, and as a man you see things that a child could not see.

"That is not to say that the child does not have certain insights. It is just that as you get older you see your childhood from a different perspective," he said.

What Bryan has given us in this moving account of a childhood spent in one of London's most notorious slum area is a chance to grow up alongside a young boy born into a shopkeeping family in 1930, and share both his pain and his triumphs. The detailed, often poignant, descriptions of school teachers, friends and family as Bryan emerges into consciousness are distressing, enlightening and colourful. And pre-war Hoxton, which was swept away in the Blitz a few years later, acts not just as a backdrop but a central player in this powerful work.

Clouds of Glory -- A Hoxton Childhood is published by Jonathan Cape at £17.99. Slow starter. . . Bryan Magee finds writing a painfully slow business, despite his 20 books