A few weeks before I was born, sometime that June in 1933 in the small back kitchen of 12, Redford Avenue, Thornton Heath, my father was intent on murdering me…

Since his first novel in 1959, Colin Spencer has written eight more and published many short stories both here and in America. His masterly Generation series, describing the anarchic lives of a group of young people growing up in the late 1950s, remain one of the great novel sequences of the twentieth century.

Best remembered now perhaps as a food writer, his column was published for fourteen years in the Guardian and his epic British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History reissued in 2011.