Memoir
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…
Should adoptive parents be allowed to pick and choose their child?
The sorrow of involuntary childlessness is profound. The award-winning novelist Patrick Flanery and his husband knew this pain. Their craving…
How my mother survived the Nazis, but took her own life
When the poet George Szirtes returned as an adult to Budapest, the city of his birth which he had left…
How I tried – and spectacularly failed – to assist my mother’s suicide
‘If your time ain’t come, not even a doctor can kill you’ — so goes the proverb that best echoes…
The day I woke up… to hear that only Tracey Thorn loved me
It’s unusual for musicians to become writers. The trajectory of yearning is meant to be the other way around. When…
France gets a taste for Bacon
The case of Michael Peppiatt is a curious one. He first met Francis Bacon when he was an undergraduate at…
In Epping Forest’s dark undergrowth
In this current era of identity politics and a more fluid approach to gender and sexuality amongst a younger generation,…
Casanova: the scandalous libertine who seduced his own daughter
This monumental unabridged audio production of Casanova’s memoir The Story of My Life in three volumes covers his first 49…
Insomnia is key to my creativity
A genre of memoir currently in vogue involves entwining the author’s personal story with the cultural history of a given…
If only we could hibernate all winter
As travel writer, nature writer, memory retriever and, I would add, prose-poet of mesmerising lyricism, Horatio Clare is a celebrant…
‘We are not cattle, we’re people’: everyday hell in Stalin’s labour camps
‘No testimony from this time must ever be forgotten,’ the great Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova says in his afterword to…
It’s the wreckage of alcoholism, not the road to recovery, that makes for enthralling reading
The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, novelist, columnist, bestselling essayist and assistant professor at Colombia University, makes for bracing reading. Clever,…
Fried squid, stale sweat and sensuality in Ian Buruma’s Tokyo
In 1975, the 24-year-old Ian Buruma (now an award-winning essayist and historian, and the editor of the New York Review…
Enduring life under Chairman Mao
Rao Pingru is 94, and a born storyteller. His gripping graphic narrative weaves in and out of the violent, disruptive…
The ordeal of being married (twice) to John Bellany
Misery memoirs are in vogue. There is much misery in this harrowing account of married life with John Bellany (1942–2013)…
The futile gang wars of New York
I’ve interviewed a lot of rappers over the years and always feel a little grimy when I find myself nudging…
The misery of policing the US–Mexico border
Francisco Cantú’s mother is surprised when he announces he’s joining the Border Patrol and going to work in the Arizona…
Laura Freeman reads her way out of anorexia
It is hard to be honest about anorexia. The illness breeds deceit and distortion: ‘It thrives on looking-glass logic. It…
The best way to escape my abusive family was to write novels
Early on in Amy Tan’s 1989 bestseller, The Joy Luck Club, a Chinese concubine slices a chunk of flesh from…
