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
Brutality rules in paradise – a memoir of Jamaican childhood
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
Who would be a farmer’s wife?
‘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
Polly Toynbee searches in vain for one working-class ancestor
Though many of her distinguished forebears campaigned vigorously against privilege and conservative elitism, they were still too posh for Toynbee’s comfort
My memories of Raymond Briggs
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: how a London barrister rediscovered her agricultural roots
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: how I loved my old Mini
Oh how I loved my old Mini
Abandoned for a bogus guru – Lily Dunn’s harrowing family memoir
Sins of My Father begins with an ending. Describing her 61-year-old parent’s final desperate flight from a life of vibrant…
My mother’s secret life was a Dickensian horror story
What happens to a child raised without love? This is the agonising question that the American lawyer Justine Cowan braces…
Diplomatic daughters go behind the scenes at Yalta
From Downing Street to Pennsylvania Avenue, history’s powerful inter-family influencers, whether spouses or children, have long operated behind weighty political…
Bringing up Benzene: Charlie Gilmour adopts a magpie
One day a baby bird falls from its nest into an oily scrapyard in Bermondsey, south London and seems unlikely…
A passionate wartime love story is rescued from oblivion
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…
The dying days of the English country house
Contrary to popular myth, the exuberant flame of life in the English country house was not extinguished by tears at…
In grandmother’s treasure-chest
Juliet Nicolson examines women’s lives and changing fashions through a rich hoard of buttons for all occasions
Sex, rebellion, ambition, prejudice: the story of 1950s women has it all
Although the young women of the 1950s hovered on the cusp of change, many did not know it. Valerie Gisborn…
