The son of affluent parents - a distant, dandified impresario father he revered; a beautiful, mindless ‘Gaiety Girl’ mother he came to regret loathing - Richard Wollheim grew up in the English suburbia of the 1920s and 1930s. Germs is his account of those years. It is a book like no other; a remarkable exploration of childhood by one of the English-speaking world’s most distinguished postwar thinkers.