Hugo Hamilton was born in 1953 to an Irish father and a German mother. When he was growing up, as he writes in this remarkable memoir, he spent a lot of time trying to prove that he wasn't a Nazi. But he never could. The sight of somebody in lederhosen and an Aran sweater was irresistible to the local bullies. Later, his peers at the prestigious Coláiste Mhuire were just as intolerant. He and his older brother couldn't put a stop to this; and neither could their parents or anybody else. This was in the solidly middle-class south County Dublin suburbs in the early 1960s, now regarded as the dawn of a less insular Ireland - a time and a place of which one might have expected better.

LRB 10 July 2003 | PDF Download