Book review – autobiography
A cacophony of complaint
What sort of monster gives a bad review to a book by someone who was gang raped as a 12-year-old…
Hitting rock bottom in LA
The title of this book tells you a lot. Jack Sutherland, who grew up in London and Los Angeles, worked…
Patti Smith grows old too gracefully
‘Jesus died for somebody’s sins/ but not mine’: the opening lines of Patti Smith’s 1975 debut album, Horses, find a…
The old-fashioned greatness of Christian Thielemann
Philip Hensher admires an old-fashioned conductor who unashamedly favours the great German composers — and Wagner in particular
A Victorian sailor is the new love of my life
Jenny Balfour Paul is an indigo dye expert. She has written two books on the subject, and lectures around the…
What did Steve Davis do to succeed at snooker? Everything his dad told him
Among the more intriguing insights into an election that seems to be taking longer than a Cliff Thorburn 50 break…
The miracle of modern flight, by a 747 pilot with a poet’s sensibility
With Alpine wreckage still being sifted, this is either a very good or a very bad time to write about…
Plumber, taxi driver, mystic, musician — the many facets of Philip Glass
Philip Hensher infinitely prefers the words to the music of the maverick ‘minimalist’ composer
Dominic Cummings (who ought to know) is not impressed by Michael Barber, Tony Blair’s former adviser and self-styled ‘delivery man’
In 2001, Tony Blair took Sir Michael Barber from his perch as special adviser in the Department for Education and…
Madly Modern Mary overcomes childhood hardships to become the Queen of Shops
In this autobiography, Mary Portas doesn’t dip into the fabled store of her talents by giving an account of her…
They sought paradise in a Scottish field — and found hunger, boredom and mosquitoes
Dylan Evans, the author of this book, was one of those oddballs who rather looked forward to the apocalypse, because…
The fallen idol: seeing Putin in a new light
The way to think about Russia, Bill Browder told me in Moscow in 2004, using a comparison he recycles in…
Rugger, Robin Hood and Rupert of the Rhine: enthusiasms of the young Antonia Fraser
Despite it being a well known fact that Antonia Fraser had earthly parents, I had always imagined that she had…
Songs for the road: through his music and his classic car collection Neil Young hopes to escape his childhood traumas
Why do people talk about ‘experimenting’ with drugs when mostly they just mean that they’re doing them? Perhaps, as I…
A misery memoir from Alan Cumming that's surprisingly thoughtful
Misery loves company. Anyone who doubts this old adage should pop into their local bookshop, because besides celebrity chefs and…
Was John Cleese ever funny?
Like many of my generation I was enchanted by the surrealistic irreverence of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, until I overheard…
What Shami regards as right isn’t necessarily what is right
Shami Chakrabarti, director of the civil rights group Liberty and omnipresent media personality, is on the cover of her book.…
Geoffrey Boycott’s new book would be of more use to English cricketers than a regiment of shrinks
After 13 barren years Yorkshire is back at the top of county cricket, where Geoffrey Boycott believes it has a…
The hell of being Michael Palin
In these diaries, which I found excellent in a very specific way, Michael Palin tells us about his life between…
Boy, can Alan Johnson write
Alan Johnson’s first volume of memoirs, This Boy, is still in the bestsellers’ list, but the Stakhanovite postman has made…
Lenin, Hitler, Sloane Square – a Polish noble's 20th-century Odyssey
If Vincent Poklewski Koziell has really drunk as much as he claims in this book I doubt he would be…
From Edwardian idyll to meetings with Nehru: the life of Lady Ursula D’Asbo
This is the Real Thing, an evocative account of English upper-class life throughout the 20th century. It begins amidst the…
Hillary Clinton’s autobiography seems destined to join her husband’s - in a bin marked ‘Free’
Last year a Washington-based journalist called Mark Leibovich wrote This Town, a book whose thesis was, roughly, that Washington-based journalists…
For Roger Bannister, the four-minute mile was just the start
The title of this reflective and readable memoir refers to the author’s lifetime interests in sport and medicine — tracks…
‘A public urinal where ministers and officials queued up to leak’
Anyone brought up as I was in a Daily Express household in the 1950s — there were approaching 11 million…
