Autobiography
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…
Some insights into autism
The Reason I Jump, by the autistic Japanese teenager Naoki Higashida, was a surprise bestseller in 2013. Rendered as a…
Age cannot wither her
There’s something reassuring about 98-year-old Diana Athill. She’s stately and well-ordered, like the gardens at Ditchingham Hall in Norfolk, her…
New word order
Peter Robins reports from Nottingham on a unique adaptation of a novel by the literary innovator B.S. Johnson
The master returns
The visionary theatremaker Robert Lepage is back in Edinburgh after a 20-year absence. Matt Trueman talks to him about trends and legacies
Man of many worlds
Cult novelist Michael Moorcock on fantasy, his father, and the London he loved and lost
The raffish toff with a winning Formula
Max Mosley’s autobiography has been much anticipated: by the motor racing world, by the writers and readers of tabloid newspapers,…
The making of a poet
A surprise! I took this book from its envelope expecting a fresh collection of Wendy Cope’s poems, and opened it…
Our homes inhabit us
Depending on your approach, home is where your heart is, where you hang your hat, or possibly where you hang…
Home truths
There were several times when reading A Dog’s Life that I felt as if I’d fallen into a time warp.…
A book for all ages
The genesis of The Road to Middlemarch was a fine article in the New Yorker about Rebecca Mead’s unsuccessful search…
From post office girl to woman of letters
Melanie McDonagh on Flora Thompson, whose revealing account of rural Oxfordshire life at the turn of the 19th century became a literary classic
Blazing saddles
Unlike many celebrity memoirs, Anjelica Huston’s is worth reading. In her Prologue she writes that as a child she modeled…
The manager, not the man
For a quarter of a century Sir Alex Ferguson bestrode football’s narrow world like a colossus. Like his predecessor knight-manager,…
An old-fashioned English eccentric
Daniel Swift 1 March 2014 9:00 am
The traditional story told about the first world war is that it changed everything: that it was the end of…