22-05-2025
Geoff Dyer: my 60s childhood of Airfix, verrucas and schoolboy larks
The novelist, essayist and inveterate traveller Geoff Dyer has written on everything from the history of the Somme to sex in hotels, tennis to DH Lawrence, often blending fiction and non-fiction with eccentric, freewheeling results. Over the past 30 years the 66-year-old has gained a reputation as an intellectual dandy. One critic, employing the most Dyeresque phrasing, wrote: 'No one is better than Geoff Dyer at not writing about what he is writing about.'
It was Dyer's wife, the art curator Rebecca Wilson, who suggested the subject of his latest book. Wilson, who comes from a 'more straightforward upper-middle-class family', thought it would be interesting to hear Dyer's account of growing up. He was, by contrast, the only child of a sheet metal worker and
