Memoir
Magpie gifts
One day a baby bird falls from its nest into an oily scrapyard in Bermondsey, south London and seems unlikely…
One of the boys
This book made me almost weep with nostalgia, but heaven knows what today’s snowflakes will make of it. Fleet Street…
High life
Gstaad I’m not usually nonplussed, but this is very strange: the memoir of Barbara Black, the wife of my…
The skeleton is key
One hot summer’s morning, as a nine-year-old girl living on the rim of a Scottish loch in the hotel owned…
A passion for collecting
Every so often the past makes a pass at you. An old school report, a train ticket, a curl from…
He shall not grow old
Whatever would Robert Johnson, self-styled King of the Delta Blues, have made of the Black Lives Matter movement? His was…
The gay carousel
John Giorno, who died last year, was a natural acolyte: he needed a superior being to set him in motion.…
The past is a foreign country
In Russian, the proverb ‘Ignorance is bliss’ translates as ‘The less you know, the better you sleep’. For those who…
The scrapheap of life
All it takes to turn a cast-off into a prized possession can be a bit of imagination. To a passerby,…
The hurricane from hell
Home, as James Baldwin wrote, is perhaps ‘not a place but simply an irrevocable condition’. Sarah M. Broom’s National Book…
Thrills and spills
Before reading this book, the only thing I knew about Action Park was that it had lent its name to…
No love lost
A book about breaking confidences, not to mention friendships, rather begs the same in return. Reading Anne Applebaum’s brief memoir…
The strain of keeping mum
Are all children of famous parents told they must have a book in them? Since Allegra Huston’s wonderful memoir Love…
Family matters
What can we ever know about our family’s past? How do we love those closest to us when doing so…
Giving the game away
This is not a rip-roaring, gonzo gambling adventure. By page 66 this cautious, thoughtful author has still never played a…
Brains and beauty
There’s a kind of writing about LA that I am a sucker for. Gossipy, lyrical, with a surface of affectless…
The pain of forgetting
‘Grief is the price we pay for love,’ the Queen once wrote. This memoir is steeped in the pain of…
Tough-minded and tender-hearted
Nine cups of milky Nescafé Gold Blend a day; a low-tar cigarette smouldering; a hot-water-bottle always on her lap; the…
Taking French leave
With more than a dozen acclaimed novels to her name, not to mention short stories, poetry, a memoir and a…
A rude awakening
Some accounts of moving to the countryside are aspirational and inspiring, but this book is more of a ‘how not…
The reluctant style guru
Alexandra Shulman says that she had ‘no desire to write an autobiography’ — so instead she has written about her…
Keeping faith
Imagine being on indefinite lockdown, imprisoned in a dark, underground, 6’ x 12’ cell, freezing in winter, boiling in summer…
The forsaken mermaid
Lamorna Ash came to the fishing port of Newlyn in south-west Cornwall to write a memoir. This is not unusual.…
A stranger to herself
How can you recover the teenage girl you were? Not just recall the memories and recount the events — this…
Trying not to get killed
Recollections of My Non-Existence is the Rebecca Solnit book I have been waiting for. I was born four years after…
