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Everyone has a swipe at their parents and the way they were brought up at some point in their lives, very few of us exact revenge to the extent that Edmund Gosse did upon his father in this superbly funny, agonising account of a very strange childhood.

The subtitle of the book is A Study of Two Temperaments and these were temperaments not destined to get on, Gosse Sr. was an eminent naturalist and zoologist and a keen follower of the Plymouth Brethren. Gosse Jr. had a natural leaning towards the arts and would grow up to be one of Victorian England’s leading literary figures. The battle lines were drawn. Throw into the picture the struggle already taking place within Gosse Sr (and most of the rest of the country) to reconcile his faith with the new Theory of Evolution as expounded by his fellow naturalist Charles Darwin and backed up by his own zoological studies and you have the makings of a seriously entertaining fight.