Memoir
It’s not the dark hours the insomniac dreads but the clear light of day
The insomniac may come to dread the night’s solitude, but the next day poses the greater challenge. That’s when you…
Deborah Orr rages against her small-town upbringing
Unlike a lot of people in the media, I didn’t personally know Deborah Orr, but I know many who did,…
Reasons for remembering things: the refugee’s last resort
A family memoir is a dangerous thing to write: one has to balance between keeping one’s subjects happy and the…
The other half of Wham!
Have you heard the story about the time that Andrew Ridgeley, the 1980s heart-throb, refused to answer the door to…
Will Self’s memoir of drug addiction is a masterpiece of black humour
Well, it was always going to be called Will. More than once in this terrifying, terrific book, Will Self refers…
The carnage inside Charlie Hebdo: an eyewitness’s account of the attack
It is almost five years since two trained jihadists went into the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris and killed…
Free of Lucian Freud — Celia Paul’s road to fulfilment
I was looking the other day at a video of the artist Celia Paul in conversation with the curator of…
Picturing paradise: the healing power of art
Some 35 years ago I visited the National Gallery of Sicily in Palermo on the hunt for the ‘Virgin Annunciate’…
My short, bitter-sweet marriage to the radical historian Raphael Samuel
In a telling moment early on in A Radical Romance, Alison Light admits that she once identified with the character…
A frank description of dementia is a searing, suffocating read
In Annie Ernaux’s The Years — her extraordinary act of collective autobiography —the ‘I’ disappears. Her memoir becomes the memoir…
Everything you always wanted to know about classical music but were afraid to ask
Novelist, essayist, painter, poet, composer. Oh yes, and pianist: Stephen Hough does all of these things very well — and…
Gales and Gaels — sailing solo from Cornwall to the Summer Isles
This is the story of a solo voyage in a 31ft- wooden sailing boat called Tsambika. Philip Marsden pilots his…
In praise of Tove Ditlevsen — the greatest Danish writer you’ve never heard of
Pick up a Penguin Classic from a cult Danish author who ‘struggled with alcohol and drug abuse’ and took her…
Compassion fatigue is as damaging to a doctor’s health as to a patient’s
Medical training is a process of toughening up: take iron that’s vulnerable to rust, add carbon and make steel. That’s…
Homage to Clement and La Frenais, the writing duo who transformed British comedy
Ray Galton and Alan Simpson remain pre-eminent as writers of television comedy, but their closest rivals Dick Clement and Ian…
Carry on up the Zambezi
I loved this book so much I was appalled. Why, when bookshops are stacked full of memoirs by authors who…
For the inhabitants of Ramallah, ‘home’ is just a memory
On a rainy day in 1955, four-year-old Raja Shehadeh left school without putting his coat on. ‘I will soon be…
Midlife crisis in Montana
For Joanna Pocock, a midlife crisis is the moment in which ‘bored of the rhythm of our days, whatever those…
From the Odyssey to Njals Saga: a voyage round the great myths
Six remarkable stories shape this book. Tracing the trajectories of the Odyssey to the Icelandic Njals Saga, via the Kosovo…
My agonising vigil over my twins’ fight for life
Memoirs about giving birth, a subject once shrouded in mystery, have become so popular that another may seem otiose. We…
The London I loved: nostalgia for a dirty old town
All cities are shapeshifters, but London is special. London is a palimpsest of places gone but not lost. Even as…
Greece is the word for the New Yorker’s Comma Queen
Mary Norris’s book about her love affair with Greece and the Greek language starts with a terrific chapter about alphabets.…
Searching for the sublime in deep dark holes
Edmund Burke, as a young Irish lawyer in 1756, first made the distinction between beauty and sublimity. Beauty for Burke…
Looking back on Baku
The discovery of oil in Baku brought Ummulbanu Asadullayeva’s family respect if not respectability. Peasant-born, her grandparents ranked by the…
How poetry turned a failing comprehensive into one of Oxford’s most oversubscribed schools
Kate Clanchy is an extraordinary person. She is a veteran of 30 years’ teaching in difficult state schools, as well…
