What is hidden in the taste of a madeleine - or in snatches of Bob Dylan songs, operatic arias, and the remembered sting of a rattan cane? An exploration of memory, Going Down for Air artfully combines two very different yet connected texts. A Memoir is richly evocative not only of times past, but also of a very English, imperial, queerly masculine subjectivity, caught on the cusp of the extinction of the world in and of which it made sense. Derek Sayer's allusive writing succeeds as few have done before in capturing the leaps and bounds of memory itself. Rich in its detail, unstinting in its...