He thinks in time-lines and relates whatever he comes across to its origins in the past. So while readers will discover what happened to the Lord family between 1939 and 1945 - not much really, they had it dead cushy - the narrative is interspersed with interpretation and discussion about how the war changed things.
Although Richard inevitably became a history teacher, his lifelong passion for retrospection was triggered, long before he could even read, by three things - the pictures in an old schoolbook, wartime news bulletins read by the BBC’s Alvar Liddell, and what his Dad told him about how it had been in the trenches in 1918.
Although the author takes his history seriously he is typically irreverent and usually up for a laugh. There is also a poignant element in a memoir that sometimes takes a confessional turn.
