Book review – memoir
Confessions of a Fedhead
Good writing about sport is rare — and good writing about tennis is that much rarer — so it’s conspicuous…
Funny things happen on the way to the Scillies
It’s a real skill, writing about a journey where nothing ever happens. We shouldn’t be surprised that Simon Armitage is…
Kultural icon
The almond eyes that rise towards their outer edges. The cheekbones that curve down to the corners of those upholstered…
Punk in a funk
Look up Tracey Thorn’s live performances with Everything But The Girl or Massive Attack on You Tube and you’ll find…
Sharpen your pencil
‘I had had a fantasy for years about owning a dairy farm,’ says Mary Norris, as she considers her career…
Little brother’s helper
Can there ever have been another book in which one of the authors (Anne Thurston in this case) so effectively…
The lure of fool’s gold
In 2008, the price of gold lofted above $1,000 an ounce for the first time in history, inspiring a rush…
Booked for a world tour
One day in 2011, while perusing her bookshelves, Ann Morgan realised her reading habits were (to her surprise) somewhat parochial.…
The absolute pits
Looking at the brightly coloured front cover of this book, I felt cheerful; turning it over and seeing the word…
In and out of Africa
‘Double ouzo, hold the Coke,’ Mum ordered at the Mkushi Country Club bar, during spanikopita night. ‘My daughter’s a lesbian.’…
Three men, two men, one man and his dog…
In 1960 John Steinbeck set off with his poodle Charley to drive around the United States in a truck equipped…
No accounting for greed
Have you ever met a sane accountant? I ask, because one of the more striking sentences in A Theft runs:…
O Jerusalem!
Unchosen is the journalist Julie Burchill’s account of how she — a bright and bratty working-class girl from Bristol —…
Our homes inhabit us
Depending on your approach, home is where your heart is, where you hang your hat, or possibly where you hang…
A memoir of love and loss
In a varied career, the actress Kika Markham has regularly played real-life charcters, including, on television, Mrs Thatcher — piquant…
Ack-ack guns on the Heath
The rise of the ‘misery memoir’ describing abusive childhoods, followed by the I-was-a-teenage-druggie-alkie-gangbanger-tick-as-appropriate memoir, pushed into the shadows an older…
Remembering what it’s like to forget
In October 2002, 28-year-old David Stuart MacLean woke up at Hyderabad railway station. He was standing at the time, and…
Oh, what a tangled web
There aren’t many places you can get shouty about Proust without losing your job. The Lane Bookshop in Perth, Western…
Funny, rude and tender
Viv Albertine is deservedly famous as the guitarist of the tumultuous, all-female English punk band The Slits. Their debut album,…
Wasted in the wastelands
Fifteen minutes by rail from Paddington, Southall is a ‘Little India’ in the borough of Ealing. An ornate Hindu temple…
A perfect stranger
If I had to be marooned on a desert island with a stranger, that stranger would be John Burnside. Not…
Don Quixote of Kaszubia
In 1993, John Borrell, a longtime foreign correspondent with no permanent home, decided to abandon journalism. Tired of writing about…
Adventures in gay Paree
In his preface to The Joy of Gay Sex (revised and expanded third edition), Edmund White praises the ‘kinkier’ aspects…
Licence to talk dirty
There aren’t many jobs that allow a nice middle-class Jewish boy to say ‘fuck’ in front of his parents. But…
A hidden gem
One of the many charms of this book is its sheer unexpectedness, which makes it hard to review, for to…
