We are very excited to announce that Justin Webb, host of the Radio 4 Today programme, will be joining us in Penarth to celebrate his new memoir The Gift of a Radio, an unflinching account of family dysfunction and education in a Quaker Boarding School and an eye-opening portrait of 1970s Britain.

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Justin Webb’s childhood was far from ordinary.

Between his mother’s un-diagnosed psychological problems, and his step-father’s untreated ones, life at home was dysfunctional at best. But with gun-wielding school masters and sub-standard living conditions, Quaker boarding school wasn’t much better.

And the backdrop to this coming of age story? Britain in the 1970s. Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin and Free. Strikes, inflation and IRA bombings. A time in which attitudes towards mental illness, parenting and masculinity were worlds apart from the attitudes we have today. A society that believed itself to be close to the edge of breakdown.

Candid, unsparing and darkly funny, Justin Webb’s memoir is a portrait of personal and national dysfunction. So was it the brutal experiences of his upbringing, or an innate ambition and drive that somehow survived them, that shaped the urbane and successful radio presenter we know and love now?

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Justin Webb is a British journalist who has worked for the BBC since 1984. He is a former BBC North America Editor and the main co-presenter of BBC One’s Breakfast News programme. Since August 2009, he has co-presented the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, and also regularly writes for the Radio Times.

£10.00 including a drink or £20.00 including a SIGNED hardback copy of The Gift of a Radio (RRP: £16.99)