Book review – memoir
Politics as Ripping Yarns: the breathless brio of Boris Johnson’s memoir
Like a cross between Aeneas and Biggles, our intrepid hero travels the world, endures a thousand ordeals and makes himself father of the world’s greatest city
The bald truth about Patrick Stewart
The actor best known for his role as Star Trek’s Captain Picard comes across as pompous, chippy and point-scoring as he reminisces about directors and fellow stars
Britney Spears is back with a vengeance
After years of abuse and being reduced to the status of child-robot, the singer is back on track with soaring album sales and a smash-hit memoir
When atonal music was original and exciting
Alexander Goehr, the sole survivor of the radical Manchester School of Music in the 1960s, describes turning pre-war European tradition into British cutting edge
How has the Conservative party’s ‘Dr No’ escaped everyone’s notice for so long?
This malevolent figure has been at the centre of the party for more than 40 years, says Nadine Dorries. But nothing in The Plot bears much relation to reality
The horror of finding oneself ‘young-old’
‘I used to run upstairs all the time,’ sixtysomething Marcus Berkmann recalls wistfully, as, midway through life’s journey, he wakes to find himself in a dark wood
No laughing matter: accusations of transphobia wrecked Graham Linehan’s life
The comedian found himself out of work and out of his marriage when he challenged the transgender ideology that to be a man or women is about choosing an identity
Solving the mystery of my mother’s kidnap
At first glance, Laura Cumming’s memoir On Chapel Sands begins with what appears to be a happy ending. On an…
The Kan-do spirit: Under Red Skies, by Karoline Kan, reviewed
The defining feature of Chinese millennials is not Instagram, avocado on toast or propertylessness. Born in the early years of…
Moby — from teetotal vegan to promiscuous party monster
In 2002 I flew to New York to interview the dance music producer whose 1999 release Play remains the bestselling…
Fishing for meaning in vanished Doggerland
Somewhere deep in the water-thick layers of Time Song, Julia Blackburn says, funnily, that in Danish, ‘the word for book…
Travelling by train – with Anna Karenina
Any memoir is a form of double-entry book-keeping, in which what has been lost is reckoned against what has been…
Michelle Obama: ‘I was happy that Barack’s career came first’
‘To me, he was sort of like a unicorn,’ writes Mrs Obama, looking back on her courtship days with Barack.…
![[Credit: Julie Edwards]](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Mark_Kermode.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
Mark Kermode: I longed to be a pop star
In the 1970s, when Mark Kermode first picked up an instrument, the UK record business was a very different place.…
‘You don’t want to end up like us’: How I got out of Soho just in time
On the one hand, I am supremely qualified to review this book. In 1984, bored beyond endurance after graduating with…
Alan Johnson: the rock and roll years
We’ve had Alan Johnson the lad from the slums of north Kensington, Alan Johnson the postman and Alan Johnson Member…
The horrors of rewilding
This unusual book begins with an account of the author’s ten-year love affair with dairy farming and an attempt ‘to…
It’s time to rehabilitate the art connoisseur
Many art historians have written their own story of the making of an aesthete: Ruskin, Berenson and Kenneth Clark to…
Vignettes of a bygone English childhood
Across the fields from the medieval manor house of Toad Hall, and the accompanying 16th-century timber-frame apothecary’s house which Alan…
Why has V.S. Naipaul rejected the Trinidad of his birth?
Savi Naipaul Akal’s publishing house is named after the peepal tree, in whose shade Buddha is said to have achieved…
The two works of fiction I re-read annually
Long ago, I interviewed Edmund White and found that the photographer assigned to the job was the incomparable Jane Bown…
The modern celebrity silk: Geoffrey Robertson ticks all the boxes
What makes a barrister famous? At one time, many of the best advocates were also prominent politicians, whose day job…
How Steven Spurrier enraged the French — and was never forgiven
Fine wine rarely makes it into the public consciousness, but one event in 1976 has proved of perennial interest: the…
Dickens and Agatha Christie made my childhood bearable
Girl with Dove is a memoir by Sally Bayley, a writer who teaches at Oxford University, of growing up in…
