Book review – memoir
The end of brotherly love
You can never completely leave a religious cult, as this strange and touching memoir demonstrates. Patterns of thinking, turns of…
By Patten or design?
My old friend Richard Ingrams was said always to write The Spectator’s television reviews sitting in the next-door room to…
Something in the water
‘It was a shock, and an epiphany,’ says Fiona Sampson, to realise that many of her favourite places were built…
A force for good
When I saw this book, a biography of Huw Wheldon, who was managing director of BBC Television between 1968 and…
Bohemian life Down Under
Here’s a pair of little books — one even littler than the other — by Robin Dalton (née Eakin), a…
Nostalgia and nihilism
‘Gilded doorknobs,’ spits a Party diehard as she contemplates the blessings of the Soviet Union’s collapse. ‘Is this freedom?’ Dozens…
One club, no hearts
Not a single line of this highly distinctive memoir happens out of doors. All of it takes place in rooms:…
Fleeing Mother Russia
‘Ah! Scrubbing the deck! My childhood dream! As a child I had once seen a sailor hosing the deck with…
The Feelgood factor
When I wrote for the NME as a schoolgirl in the 1980s, it was recognised that there were musicians who…
Goodbye to all that
Glimpsing the title of Lynsey Hanley’s absorbing new book as it fell out of the jiffy bag, I found myself…
Escape from the hood
The author of the bestseller Between the World and Me and recipient of a MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ last year, Ta-Nehisi…
The death of the author
The ‘journey’ — at least the one played out in public — begins with an announcement that you are incurable.…
Out of the depths
‘This happens to other people.’ The Guardian journalist Decca Aitkenhead says she had heard the phrase countless times, interviewing the…
To be a pilgrim
In his friendly and beguiling voice, Jean-Christophe Rufin explains (in a way that reminded me of the pre-journey relish of…
Sick transit
Sitting at her desk at the BBC in March 2006, researching a documentary about the Olympic Games, Caroline Jones pressed…
Mother courage
Helen Stevenson’s daughter Clara has cystic fibrosis. Love Like Salt is an account of living with the disease, but it…
The ultimate nightmare
On an April morning in 1999, two teenagers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, walked into Columbine High School in Colorado…
Fifty shades of blue
Like a lot of people, Olivia Laing came to New York to join a lover. Like a lot of people,…
Strangers in their native land
Though it seems to begin as an affectionate memorial to his maternal grandparents, a testimonial to a rare and perfectly…
A love letter to Italy
Imagine you’re an unknown young writer whose first collection of stories wins the Pulitzer prize. Your first novel is filmed,…
Escaping the Inferno
I read this, Meg Rosoff’s first novel for adults (though her previous fiction, aimed at teenagers, is widely enjoyed by…
Burrowed wisdom
Being a Beast is an impassioned and proselytising work of philosophy based on a spectacular approach to nature writing. That…
Raptor rapture
The fewer birds there are, the more books about them, particularly of the literary kind. Helen MacDonald’s H is for…
Voices of St Joan
I don’t know if this counts as name-dropping, but I recently interviewed a boyhood friend of Elvis Presley’s in Tupelo,…
From surgeon’s scrubs to patient’s gown
Who would you trust to take a blade to your brain? Medical schools and hospitals, arbiters of this outrageous intimacy,…
