Autobiography and Personal Philosophy of a Retired Physician, by Cyril Hart

Born a Cockney, Cyril Hart spent his childhood on a large housing estate at Dagenham, just outside London's East End. He was raised in an evangelical Christian family, but by the age of 18 he was a card-holding Communist. He passed this phase and during the war served in the ranks in the army, and with a commission in the RNVR, where he was an air engineer. Subsequently he entered Barts and graduated in medicine. He married, and for over 30 years was the senior partner in a large country practice in Huntingdonshire. He studied local history at Leicester, where he became the university's first MA and was awarded its first DLitt. He has written extensively in medicine and in English history, and is currently completing a book on England in the Tenth Century. In retirement he also turned to philosophy and water colours. This unusual range of interests is the range of his autobiography, and the book also presents a fascinating social history of one English family during the whole of the present century.