Going Up: To Cambridge and beyond - A Writer's Memoir

by Frederic Raphael

The manager’s name was Love. His first- floor flat was diagonally across the private road and the rose beds from ours. Each weekday morning, at eight fifteen, he hooked open his lattice-paned bedroom window and did exercises, in a white sleeveless vest and white drawers. So begins the compelling personal story of one of Britain’s finest authors, Frederic Raphael. Going Up is a transatlantic voyage, taking us from Chicago to Putney, on up to Cambridge, and beyond to Fleet Street – but it is also an intimate journey into the early experiences and inspirations that forged the tools of this most versatile of writers. Tracing a path from the heady Cambridge days that would provide the setting of Raphael’s acclaimed BBC television series The Glittering Prizes to the European wanderings and romantic yearnings that helped populate the pages of his opulent novels and Oscar-winning screenplays, this memoir is shot through with its author’s incomparable wit and intellect. Ranging from the fabulously indiscreet to the deeply moving, Going Up is a dazzling display of the virtuoso prose style of one of Britain’s most justly celebrated writers.

451 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 16, 2015

About the author

Writer, critic and broadcaster, Frederic Raphael was educated at Charterhouse School and at St John's College, Cambridge. He has written several screenplays and fifteen novels. His The Glittering Prizes was one of the major British and American television successes of the 1970s.

Reviews

[Jarrod Sio · Rating 2 out of 5]

Self-aggrandising and meaningful only to Raphael’s hangers-on, 'Going Up' is interesting inasmuch as it focuses on Cambridge in general and St John's in particular. Beyond that, the memoir is best read and then relegated to a dusty recess of Raphael’s family library - hopefully never to see the light of day again.