What publishing a book has in common with childbirth
‘Are you ready?’ a kind but optimistic friend asked me a few weeks ago with a look of genuine concern.…
The shame of being an alcoholic mother
Julia Hamilton and her daughter Arabella Byrne share their experiences of an addiction that seemed ‘baked into them like a curse’, and the special stigma they felt attached to them
The summer I dwelt in marble halls
Gill Johnson recalls the glorious months she once spent in the ‘gilded labyrinth’ of a Venetian palazzo, employed as an English tutor to an aristocratic Italian family
Hope in hell
Brought up by a tyrannical father in the postcard beauty of Montego Bay, this is a story of the author’s salvation through literature and the ferocity of maternal love
A farm in the Fells
‘Some days I feel like I’m drowning,’ admits Helen Rebanks, caught between cooking, housework, admin, tagging lambs and the school run at the Lake District family farm
Guilt and gingerbread
Though many of her distinguished forebears campaigned vigorously against privilege and conservative elitism, they were still too posh for Toynbee’s comfort
Father Curmudgeon
Christmas won’t be the same without Raymond Briggs
Why I queued to see the Queen
I went there with Rachel my best friend from childhood. We both wore black. Even our trainers were black. We…
A call to farms
Farming threaded its way through the fields, mud, hedgerows and lifeblood of the people who made up Sarah Langford’s childhood.…
A vroom of one’s own
Oh how I loved my old Mini
An awful warning
Sins of My Father begins with an ending. Describing her 61-year-old parent’s final desperate flight from a life of vibrant…
Misery handed on
What happens to a child raised without love? This is the agonising question that the American lawyer Justine Cowan braces…
Three Girl Fridays
From Downing Street to Pennsylvania Avenue, history’s powerful inter-family influencers, whether spouses or children, have long operated behind weighty political…
Magpie gifts
One day a baby bird falls from its nest into an oily scrapyard in Bermondsey, south London and seems unlikely…
Longing to be wanton
Once in a while, just at the right moment, a truly gorgeous real-life love story appears out of the blue,…
If only we could hibernate all winter
As travel writer, nature writer, memory retriever and, I would add, prose-poet of mesmerising lyricism, Horatio Clare is a celebrant…
The miseries of diplomatic life: heat, bedbugs and endless cocktail parties
The arrival at a new foreign posting for a junior diplomat’s wife in the first half of the last century…
The BBC’s battle for Britain
The camouflage-painted, smoke-blackened entrance to London’s 1940s Broadcasting House, moated with sandbags and battered by bombs, provided its staff with…
Great halls, last balls
Contrary to popular myth, the exuberant flame of life in the English country house was not extinguished by tears at…
A box of delights
Juliet Nicolson examines women’s lives and changing fashions through a rich hoard of buttons for all occasions
Women take wing
Although the young women of the 1950s hovered on the cusp of change, many did not know it. Valerie Gisborn…
