The autobiography of celebrated British photojournalist Martin Parr has been slow to materialise. It’s not hard to work out why. Parr is a man of few words, as I discovered for myself, having failed to heed the cacophony of warning bells occasioned by his co-author Wendy Jones’s admission that she gave up on the book for 15 years for this reason.

There’s a sort of garrulousness to Parr’s photographs of the British public at leisure that can mislead you into thinking he’s going to be good for a chat. Surely you have to be a pretty upfront sort of person to take the pictures he does – so often close encounters with expanses of sunburnt flesh, beer guts and screaming children. There’s the man sunbathing on Eastbourne beach from Parr’s Think of England project, in which a great deal o

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