Memoir
‘I felt offended on behalf of my breasts’ – Jean Hannah Edelstein
When misguided well-wishers suggest to Edelstein, post-mastectomy, that she might now have ‘the breasts of her dreams’, she wants to reply that those had always been her own
Petty, malicious and tremendous fun – the Facebook office drama
Sarah Wynn-Williams’s gleeful dissections of former colleagues’ foibles were met with furious denials and the threat of legal action – guaranteeing maximum publicity for her book
William Blake still weaves his mystic spell
Philip Hoare considers the ageless, hypnotic appeal of the painter, poet, visionary and ‘one-man utopia’
Why, at 75, does Graydon Carter still feel the need to impress?
The humblebrag and name-dropping read more like a Craig Brown pastiche than the reminiscences of one of America’s most celebrated magazine editors
The danger of becoming a ‘professional survivor’
Though extraordinarily lucky to have escaped massacre in Rwanda in 1994, all Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse now seems to focus on is finding photographic evidence of her rescue
The sickness at the heart of boxing
After 30 years as a boxing correspondent, Donald McRae has seen enough, angered by the lies, dope, inadequate safety protocols and lure of Saudi sponsorship
Who will care for the carers themselves?
Caroline Elton describes the problems of looking after her profoundly autistic brother, and admits to childhood feelings of fear, guilt and resentment
The comfort of curling up with a violent thriller
When post-natal depression descends, Lucy Mangan describes reaching for Lee Child, finding catharsis in his no-nonsense villain-bashing
The sexual escapades of Edmund White sound like an improbably sordid Carry On film
The octogenarian writer seems unable to resist the burlesque, describing the most lurid encounters at an apparently droll remove
The nerdy obsessive who became the world’s richest man
Seen by fellow pupils as an obnoxious loner, Bill Gates was a rebellious teenager, challenging his teachers and ‘at war’ with his parents
The strange potency of cheap perfume
Adelle Stripe has constructed a memoir around 18 key fragrances, but it is the Body Shop’s cheery Dewberry that evokes her worst teenage experience
Red-letter days for Gilbert & George
After a successful show in Moscow in 1990, the odd couple went on to even greater triumph in China three years later, as the long-suffering curator of both exhibitions describes
The next best thing to visiting a really clever friend in New York
Vivian Gornick’s memoir of life in the city in the 1960s and 1970s is rich in anecdote and dialogues with waspish friends and neighbours
Four legs good, two legs bad – the philosophy of Gerald Durrell
From a young man determined to protect the world’s vulnerable species, Durrell became in middle age someone who loathed the species of which he was a member
Was Graham Brady really the awesome power-broker he imagines?
His kiss-and-tell memoir implies that the past five Tory prime ministers all feared him. But the longtime Chair of the 1922 Committee was in reality no ‘kingmaker’
A rare combination of humour and pathos: the sublimely talented Neil Innes
The musician and parodist, whose mantra was ‘not to say no when there’s a way to say yes’, had a gift for creating happiness in private as well as public, as his widow poignantly attests
The good soldier Maczek – a war hero betrayed
After fighting for the Allies in Hungary, France, Belgium and Holland, Stanislaw Maczek finds himself stripped of his Polish citizenship as a result of the Yalta conference
Besieged Odesa is still caught in a conflict of identities
Older citizens have identified with Russia all their lives – and Russian is still commonly spoken everywhere. But young Odesans are now using more Ukrainian as a symbol of resistance
A father’s love: Childish Literature, by Alejandro Zambra, reviewed
The Chilean writer contributes obliquely to the fledgling genre of fatherhood literature, combining family vignettes with literary criticism and a ‘diary’ addressed to his infant son
Fortitude, emotional intelligence and wit – the defining qualities of Simon Russell Beale
The Shakespearean actor has taken on 18 of the great roles since his first gig at the RSC in 1985 and recalls them with insight, sensitivity and a sharp passion for language
Seeking forgiveness for gluttony, sloth and other deadly sins
The neurologist Guy Leschziner explores the medical conditions that might underlie extremes of human behaviour in a fascinating study that combines biology and psychology
Surviving an abusive mother-daughter relationship
In a dialogue with her younger self, the Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis tries to make sense of her traumatic upbringing at the hands of a repressive, coercive mother
The shame of being an alcoholic mother
Julia Hamilton and her daughter Arabella Byrne share their experiences of an addiction that seemed ‘baked into them like a curse’, and the special stigma they felt attached to them
From public bar to cocktail bar: books for the discerning drinker
There’s something for all tastes this year, whether poetic meditations on the pub, advice on wines for extended cellaring or recipes for new-wave martinis
