Autobiography
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,…
Trivial moaning
There is much to be said for Schadenfreude. (If it was edible, it would be a meal in a very…
Bertie Wooster in the commentary box
There can be a strong strain of self-parody in even the greatest commentators. When Henry Blofeld describes the progress of…
The courage of her convictions
In 2012 a Taleban gunman, infuriated by Malala Yousafzai’s frequent television appearances insisting that girls had a right to education,…
An elegant command
Alan Bennett once overheard an old lady say, ‘I think a knighthood was wasted on Derek Jacobi,’ and I know…
A unique capacity for personal egotism
It is peculiarly apt that the author of this autobiography should be the man who coined that now fashionable term…
The Pepys de nos jours
Frederic Raphael is forensic in his description of the failures of successful people. He is enviously superior and he is…
Escape through the locks
The title, the subtitle, the author’s plain name, even the jacket’s photograph of a laughing old lady in sunglasses: none…
When the picturesque turns ugly
Under his real name, Charles James Stranks, the author of this little masterpiece wrote on a number of ecclesiastical subjects:…
Good timing
‘Value and worth in any of the arts has always been about timing,’ writes British director Nicolas Roeg at the…
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…