Audio books

Nigel Slater’s nostalgically scrumptious Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger (HarperCollins, unabridged, c 6hr, £12.99; offer £10.39) is as much a menu of 1950s and 60s eating as an autobiography of childhood. Slater switches so accurately back into the persona of the little boy who loved cooking from earliest youth and doted on crumble (“even bad crumble is good”) that it is a bit of a shock to remember he is not the angelic little child in the oversize school tie on the tape’s cover, but the assured middle-aged cook on its back.

His narrative evokes the realities of childhood in Macmillan’s “Never had it so good” years: he collected model cars, wiped his feet on the doormat and was too innocent to understand what Uncle Fred was up to when he played “find the sixpence in my trouser pocket” or that anything was seriously wrong with his ailing mother. His turns of phrase are every bit as good as his cookbooks’ rapturous descriptions of food. Tapioca, forcibly administered by school prefects, is “frog’s spawn stirred into wallpaper paste”; “When you catch porridge at the right moment, it’s like being wrapped in a cashmere blanket”; marshmallows are “the nearest food to a kiss”.