Book review – memoir
Not so happy valley
Simon Barnes opens with a presumably true idea, that we are all in search of our own versions of paradise…
A legend in her own time
I usually dread the final 15 minutes of a celebrity interview: the awkward section during which the writer must steer…
Drying out in the Orkneys
‘If I were to go mad,’ Amy Liptrot writes in her memoir of alcoholism and the Orkneys, ‘It would come…
The medium is the message
Molly Crabapple is an American artist and Drawing Blood is the story of her life. That life has only been…
Girl about town
The old ditty got it wrong: it should have been ‘Maybe it’s because I’m not a Londoner that I love…
Anatomy of a bestseller
Every four seconds, somewhere in the world, a Lee Child book is sold. This phenomenal statistic places Child alongside Stephen…
Of hearts and heads
Like most trade unionists in the 1970s and 80s I worked with a fair few communists. Men like Dickie Lawlor,…
More terrible beauty
At some point during your reading of this book the realisation might dawn, if you didn’t already know about his…
A posh Del Boy
The Art of Smuggling comes garlanded with fraternal encomia from Howard ‘Mr Nice’ Marks, Phil Sparrowhawk (author of Grass) and…
Family divisions
The geological title of this unhappy memoir is an apt metaphor for fissures in the relationships between individuals of David…
A life well lived
‘I cannot say there is no vanity in making this funeral oration of myself, but I hope it is not…
Chrissie Hynde writes like an angel on angel dust
‘The day I found out that Suzi Quatro wasn’t a dyke was the worst day of my life!’ a teenage…
Here’s to Bill
Often, Christmas is a time for moaning after the night before, when the seasonal drinking is remembered (if remembered at…
The smoking diary of Gregor Hens
The link between smoking and self-expression is long-established. The only thing worse than not being able to smoke, says Will…
Life in the chain gang
In 2004, French police officers searching the home of the professional cyclist David Millar found some syringes and empty phials…
Where would America be without Gloria Steinem?, asks Carmen Callil
This is a book written by a most admirable woman, which is nevertheless — with some rare and excellent exceptions…
Warning: this book only contains strong language
Dan Marshall, the author of this memoir, loves to swear. ‘It’s very difficult for me to write a sentence without…
A terrible beauty
A.S. Byatt on the dark, deadly secrets lurking beneath a calm, white surface
Life with old father William
This intensely written memoir by Adam Mars-Jones about his Welsh father, Sir William, opens with the death of Sheila, Adam’s…
Nimble-witted wanderer
It was a certain unforgettable ex-girlfriend, Harry Mount confesses — named only as ‘S’ in his dedication — who came…
The rich are a different species
The scene: a funeral parlour in New York. Doors clang as a family relative, the ‘black sheep’, saunters in halfway…
The devils’ advocate
Jeremy Hutchinson was the doyen of the criminal bar in the 1960s and 1970s. No Old Bailey hack or parvenu…
One vast, blaring cultural circus
In the late 1980s Peter Ackroyd invited me to meet Iain Sinclair, whose first novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, I…
Curious shades of Browne
On the evening of 10 March 1804, Samuel Taylor Coleridge settled at a desk in an effort to articulate what…
Robin Hood v. the toffs
The publicity blurb about the two unpleasant criminals whom this dismal book romanticises says that they are ‘continuing their ancestors’…
