Alexei Sayle, the only son of a genial railway worker and an irascible redhead from a Latvian Jewish family, was born in Liverpool on the day egg rationing came to an end. It dawned on him at an early age that he wasn't like other kids. They got to see Bambi at the local cinema while his parents, explaining to their six-year-old son that Walt Disney was a supporter of McCarthyism, took him instead to see Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky  a film containing several scenes of ritual child sacrifice. Still, having staunch communists for parents did have some advantages: with his father's free rail travel they headed not to Blackpool on holiday but straight for the Soviet bloc. Touching on the enormous changes affecting his family, his city, Britain and eastern Europe, this book leaves you with a sense that Sayle has something serious to say about his parent's unshakeable faith in an ideology based on the elimination of nuance  but that something is sadly stifled by his own commitment to punctuating everything with a joke.