Memoir
Secret assignations
Adam Sisman on the private life of John le Carré, revealed in letters and a kiss-and-tell
The road less travelled
How best to write a book about the Himalayas when Mount Everest has been reduced to just another tick-off on…
The fate of castaways
Absent mothers resonate in the latest offerings from two heavyweights of French literature. Getting Lost is the diary kept by…
The Middle East maelstrom
For 25 years, Abed Takkoush assisted foreign reporters like Jeremy Bowen when they arrived to cover the chaos and conflicts…
Loved and lost
Richard E. Grant pulls off a feat here. The title is twee but the content isn’t. With unselfpitying dash the…
A home between worlds
When asked what it is we do, translators often resort to metaphors. We liken the act of translation to performing…
You eat what you see
Farmer, restaurateur, critic, foodie activist, traveller (he’s worked in Zimbabwe as well as South Africa), cookery book writer, longtime TV…
A sadder and a wiser man
‘Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults.’ A.N. Wilson seems, on the surface, to have taken to heart…
Conflict in the Highlands
On the face of it, a book about a woman stalking one red deer might not sound that exciting. Just…
A multiplicity of Italys
Towards the end of Dandelions, Thea Lenarduzzi’s imaginative and deeply affecting memoir, the author quotes her grandmother’s remark that there…
Last words
Facing up to the prospect of one’s own mortality is always jarring; but when you’ve spent your life trying, and…
A sentimental journey
Publishers lately seem to have got the idea that otherwise uncommercial subjects might be rendered sexy if presented with a…
Journey to selfhood
Seán Hewitt, born in 1990, realised that he was gay at a very early age. ‘A kind, large woman’ who…
Making scientific history
In 1993 William Waldegrave, the science minister, was looking into a project being planned on the continent. Cern, the European…
The lady in the caravan
Towards the end of a long relationship – ‘resolved to have a conversation about the Future, which meant Separating’ –…
Riding the feedless horse
Jody Rosen lives and cycles in Brooklyn, which makes him what the Mexican essayist Julio Torri calls ‘a suicide apprentice’.…
Voices of the veld
Julia Blackburn’s Dreaming the Karoo is the diary of a very bad year: from March 2020, when a research trip…
This other Eden
Whatever one thinks of the government’s plans to send refugees to Rwanda, it was amusing to see this country’s left…
Blood lines
Where does a mother’s history end and a daughter’s begin?
A death-haunted city
Naples, the tatterdemalion capital of the Italian south, is said to be awash with heroin. Chinese-run morphine refineries on its…
Going the whole hog
A popular pastime in Britain is to post one’s breakfast on social media for strangers to pass judgment on bacon…
Escape from drudgery
Shunned by his father and his peers because of his homosexuality, Édouard Louis (born Eddy Bellegueule in 1992) left his village…
The great arbitrator
‘The law,’ according to W.S. Gilbert’s Lord Chancellor, ‘is the true embodiment of everything that’s excellent’ and, by common consent,…
Remember forget-me-nots?
‘There are a great many ways of holding on to our sanity amid the vices and follies of the world,’…
An interplay of voices
Margo Jefferson’s Constructing a Nervous System compresses memoir and cultural criticism into one slim, explosive volume, and in doing so…
