In this vivid and iconoclastic memoir, John Passmore takes us on an unsentimental journey from his childhood in Manly, then half-village, half-resort-'seven miles from Sydney, a thousand miles from care'-to the hot-house environment of the University of Sydney, and on to the realities of his imagined Europe. These physical voyages were rites of passage. The first marked the end of the fierce parochialism of childhood, inducting him into university...