Memoir
A translator’s responsibilities are as formidable as a transplant surgeon’s
When asked what it is we do, translators often resort to metaphors. We liken the act of translation to performing…
A single meal in Rome is a lesson in Italian history
Farmer, restaurateur, critic, foodie activist, traveller (he’s worked in Zimbabwe as well as South Africa), cookery book writer, longtime TV…
A.N. Wilson has many regrets
‘Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults.’ A.N. Wilson seems, on the surface, to have taken to heart…
Scotland’s deer are proving deeply divisive
On the face of it, a book about a woman stalking one red deer might not sound that exciting. Just…
Pre-Mussolini, most Italians couldn’t understand each other
Towards the end of Dandelions, Thea Lenarduzzi’s imaginative and deeply affecting memoir, the author quotes her grandmother’s remark that there…
A dying doctor’s last words
Facing up to the prospect of one’s own mortality is always jarring; but when you’ve spent your life trying, and…
In search of the peripatetic philosopher Theophrastus
Publishers lately seem to have got the idea that otherwise uncommercial subjects might be rendered sexy if presented with a…
A gay journey of self-discovery
Seán Hewitt, born in 1990, realised that he was gay at a very early age. ‘A kind, large woman’ who…
Solving the mystery of mass almost ruined Peter Higgs’s life
In 1993 William Waldegrave, the science minister, was looking into a project being planned on the continent. Cern, the European…
A poet finds home in a patch of nettles
Towards the end of a long relationship – ‘resolved to have a conversation about the Future, which meant Separating’ –…
The pleasures – and perils – of getting on your bike
Jody Rosen lives and cycles in Brooklyn, which makes him what the Mexican essayist Julio Torri calls ‘a suicide apprentice’.…
The lost world of the Karoo
Julia Blackburn’s Dreaming the Karoo is the diary of a very bad year: from March 2020, when a research trip…
Is self-loathing the British disease?
Whatever one thinks of the government’s plans to send refugees to Rwanda, it was amusing to see this country’s left…
Where does a mother’s history end and a daughter’s begin?
Where does a mother’s history end and a daughter’s begin?
Naples will never escape the shadow of Vesuvius
Naples, the tatterdemalion capital of the Italian south, is said to be awash with heroin. Chinese-run morphine refineries on its…
The great breakfast dilemma: should baked beans be part of a full English?
A popular pastime in Britain is to post one’s breakfast on social media for strangers to pass judgment on bacon…
All about my mother: Édouard Louis’s latest family saga
Shunned by his father and his peers because of his homosexuality, Édouard Louis (born Eddy Bellegueule in 1992) left his village…
Michael Beloff QC drops names – but they’re not the ones we’re curious about
‘The law,’ according to W.S. Gilbert’s Lord Chancellor, ‘is the true embodiment of everything that’s excellent’ and, by common consent,…
We could all once tell bird’s-foot trefoil from rosebay willowherb
‘There are a great many ways of holding on to our sanity amid the vices and follies of the world,’…
Ethel, Ella and all that jazz: the soundtrack of a Chicago childhood
Margo Jefferson’s Constructing a Nervous System compresses memoir and cultural criticism into one slim, explosive volume, and in doing so…
Piloting a Boeing Dreamliner can be less than dreamy
Mark Vanhoenacker dreams of my nightmares. Ever since he was a young boy, he fantasised about piloting airplanes. Ever since…
Jarvis Cocker measures out his life in attic junk
If you were hoping for an autobiography this isn’t it. Jarvis Cocker calls it ‘an inventory’ and insists: ‘This is…
From teenage delinquent to man of letters: James Campbell’s remarkable career
The great age of the Scottish autodidact must have ended a century ago, but it had a prodigious impact while…
What do Beethoven, D.H. Lawrence and George Best have in common?
This is not a book about tennis. Roger Federer appears early on, trailed by the obligatory question ‘When will he…
Musings on harmony, melody and rhythm
Every Good Boy Does Fine – a banal phrase that also just happens to be the key to limitless wonder.…
