Autobiography
Was Cat Stevens the inspiration for Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain’?
The pop pin-up of the 1970s certainly suggests so – and, judging by his ‘official autobiography’, still finds himself endlessly fascinating
The key to Giorgia Meloni’s resounding success
The once sullen, bullied girl, abandoned by her father as a baby, found iron in her soul and refused to become a victim
The sexual escapades of Edmund White sound like an improbably sordid Carry On film
The octogenarian writer seems unable to resist the burlesque, describing the most lurid encounters at an apparently droll remove
The ghost of his father haunts Winston Churchill
In a whimsical piece written by Churchill in 1947, Lord Randolph’s ethereal figure appears in the studio at Chartwell – to muse on the possibility of a political career for his son
‘You can really sing!’ – Sonny discovers the teenage Cher
The moment Sonny heard the voice of the girl he employed as a cleaner, both their fortunes changed – and two years later the couple would be greeted by 5,000 screaming fans in New York
Four legs good, two legs bad – the philosophy of Gerald Durrell
From a young man determined to protect the world’s vulnerable species, Durrell became in middle age someone who loathed the species of which he was a member
The good soldier Maczek – a war hero betrayed
After fighting for the Allies in Hungary, France, Belgium and Holland, Stanislaw Maczek finds himself stripped of his Polish citizenship as a result of the Yalta conference
Who’s still flying the flag for Britpop?
Alex James’s embrace of the term distinguishes him from his contemporaries. Miranda Sawyer reminds us of how much of the best 1990s music fell outside Britpop’s retromania
Fortitude, emotional intelligence and wit – the defining qualities of Simon Russell Beale
The Shakespearean actor has taken on 18 of the great roles since his first gig at the RSC in 1985 and recalls them with insight, sensitivity and a sharp passion for language
From street urchin to superstar: the unlikely career of Al Pacino
Ellen Barkin, Al Pacino’s lover-cum-prime- suspect in his comeback movie Sea of Love (1989), once dismissed the artifice of the…
David Baddiel’s father and mother must be the most talked about parents in Britain
Colin the Dinky Toys dealer, familiar from Baddiel’s TV documentaries, emerges from this memoir as a relentless bully, but at least the ‘fantasist’ Sarah provides suitably funny anecdotes
‘I’m a hypocrite and a total fraud’ – the confessions of a French Surrealist poet
My writing is mere bricolage … whatever I do, I only half do’, wails Michel Leiris in the final volume of his self-lacerating autobiography
The sheer drudgery of professional tennis
The most surprising thing about Conor Niland’s bruising account of his tennis career is that he emerges with his sanity intact
The ordeal of sitting for my father Lucian Freud
Rose Boyt describes posing naked over many nights – supplied with purple hearts by Freud to keep her awake – and her shock on finally seeing the result
Never the bride
Tom Williams describes how two women’s hopes of marrying T.S. Eliot came to nothing
A bold departure
Ian McEwan’s latest novel is unusually long and autobiographical. It’s surprising in other ways, too, says Claire Lowdon
That way madness lies
There is a trend for books in which academics write personally about their engagement with literature. Examples include Lara Feigel’s…
Flower power
Real Estate is the third and concluding volume of Deborah Levy’s ground-breaking ‘Living Autobiography’. Fans of Levy’s alluring, highly allusive…
Transport of joy
If 2020 has given us something to talk about other than Covid, it’s been history — and, more precisely, to…
Reliving the golden moment
What caught my eye towards the end of Look Again was this conversation between David Bailey and the shoe designer…
A study in realpolitik
Barack Obama was famous for his rhetoric, but his achievements show just what a steely political operator he was too, says Sam Leith
Words take wing
When Helen Macdonald was a child, she had a way of calming herself during moments of stress: closing her eyes,…
Being Woody Allen
It’s been tough recently being Woody Allen, something that didn’t look too easy to begin with. Last year Amazon breached…
Out of order
In his autobiography, John Bercow takes his peerage as a given. But that might be scuppered by accusations of bullying, says Lynn Barber
‘A triumph of meandering’
Sara Wheeler 27 November 2021 9:00 am
This is a book about George Orwell’s recognition that desire and joy can be forces of opposition to the authoritarian…