In the memoir, Dyer cites the opening line from The Go-Between: “The past is a foreign country.” He then goes on to say, “If there is one thing the past is not, it’s another country. The past is this country—this England. My England.” That line is like a watermark imprinted on every page of this book. To me, and readers like me who grew up at the same time (60s-70s), listening to a lot of the same music, watching the same movies and reading the same books, but in a different part of the (English-speaking) world, the past he describes is a foreign country. If you weren’t brought up in that system, you need a finely tuned ear to detect the book’s subtle undercurrents of class consciousness running through it (which Dyer made me aware of in our conversation). But it’s the humor and vividness that resonate, even if the world he describes and his experiences in it are never entirely familiar - we are, after all, in George Bernard Shaw’s immortal words, two countries separated by a common language.