Autobiography
‘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
The lonely passions of Emily Hale and Mary Trevelyan
Tom Williams describes how two women’s hopes of marrying T.S. Eliot came to nothing
Ian McEwan’s capacity for reinvention is astonishing
Ian McEwan’s latest novel is unusually long and autobiographical. It’s surprising in other ways, too, says Claire Lowdon
Jonathan Bate weaves a memoir around madness in English literature
There is a trend for books in which academics write personally about their engagement with literature. Examples include Lara Feigel’s…
The stuff of everyday life: Real Estate, by Deborah Levy, reviewed
Real Estate is the third and concluding volume of Deborah Levy’s ground-breaking ‘Living Autobiography’. Fans of Levy’s alluring, highly allusive…
Transport to Australia was the saving of Carmen Callil’s family
If 2020 has given us something to talk about other than Covid, it’s been history — and, more precisely, to…
No one ‘got’ the Sixties better than David Bailey
What caught my eye towards the end of Look Again was this conversation between David Bailey and the shoe designer…
Barack Obama was decidedly a man of action as well as words
Barack Obama was famous for his rhetoric, but his achievements show just what a steely political operator he was too, says Sam Leith
Helen Macdonald could charm the birds out of the trees
When Helen Macdonald was a child, she had a way of calming herself during moments of stress: closing her eyes,…
Is this the last round in the great celebrity Punch and Judy show?
It’s been tough recently being Woody Allen, something that didn’t look too easy to begin with. Last year Amazon breached…
Unspeakably prolix and petty: will anyone want to read John Bercow’s autobiography?
In his autobiography, John Bercow takes his peerage as a given. But that might be scuppered by accusations of bullying, says Lynn Barber
Why David Suchet makes the perfect Poirot
I can imagine a quiz question along the lines of ‘What do Shylock, Lady Bracknell, Sigmund Freud and Hercule Poirot…
Neither ‘Mad Dog’ nor ‘Warrior Monk’, General Jim Mattis is a thoughtful strategist
General Jim Mattis ended his remarkable career as a four-star US marine general, and finally as US secretary of defense.…
When a footman’s home is his castle
My own love for this memoir may be all to do with snobbery and self-identification. Moreover, I’ve always thought a…
How I’ll remember John Humphrys — by his producer Sarah Sands
There was a dinner in Soho to celebrate the publication of John Humphrys’s book, A Day Like Today. John was…
Duty, devotion and lack of self-pity — Anne Glenconner is an example to us all
Trained from a young age to be self-effacing, never liking to be the centre of attention, having been traumatised for…
A force for good: Samantha Power is driven by a deep sense of idealism
In the spring of 2008 I spent a fine day in the company of Samantha Power. She had come to…
Being diagnosed as autistic was the happiest day of my life
It’s easy to forget that until the late 1980s the notion of an autistic person being able to write a…
The old monster Elton John appears charmingly self-deprecating
I don’t care for Elton John. A cross between Violet Elizabeth Bott and Princess Margaret, his temper tantrums are legendary,…
Debbie Harry makes the perfect pop star
My admiration for Deborah Harry goes back a long way and — fittingly for a woman who even as a…
Entertaining Iris Murdoch – for months on end
If you know your Peter Conradi from your Peter J. Conradi, you’ll also know that the former is foreign editor…
Homer Simpson meets Homer
Milan Kundera has said that Homer’s Odyssey was the first novel. I’m not so sure — the verse kind of…
The unfamiliar Orwell: the writer as passionate gardener
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…