Book review – memoir

The bald truth about Patrick Stewart

16 December 2023 9:00 am

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

2 December 2023 9:00 am

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

2 December 2023 9:00 am

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?

18 November 2023 9:00 am

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’

11 November 2023 9:00 am

‘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

11 November 2023 9:00 am

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

A snapshot of George holding his infant daughter on Chapel Sands provides a key to the family mystery.

Solving the mystery of my mother’s kidnap

29 June 2019 9:00 am

At first glance, Laura Cumming’s memoir On Chapel Sands begins with what appears to be a happy ending. On an…

Karoline Kan

The Kan-do spirit: Under Red Skies, by Karoline Kan, reviewed

29 June 2019 9:00 am

The defining feature of Chinese millennials is not Instagram, avocado on toast or propertylessness. Born in the early years of…

Moby performing in Los Angeles in March this year

Moby — from teetotal vegan to promiscuous party monster

15 June 2019 9:00 am

In 2002 I flew to New York to interview the dance music producer whose 1999 release Play remains the bestselling…

The catch from the Dogger Bank is landed on the beach at Schevingen from Dutch fishing vessels — or ‘doggers’

Fishing for meaning in vanished Doggerland

9 February 2019 9:00 am

Somewhere deep in the water-thick layers of Time Song, Julia Blackburn says, funnily, that in Danish, ‘the word for book…

Vivien Leigh as Anna Karenina in the 1948 film. Credit: Getty Images

Travelling by train – with Anna Karenina

9 February 2019 9:00 am

Any memoir is a form of double-entry book-keeping, in which what has been lost is reckoned against what has been…

Michelle Obama listens to the National Anthem at the White House Correspondents Association annual dinner in Washington, May 2009

Michelle Obama: ‘I was happy that Barack’s career came first’

1 December 2018 9:00 am

‘To me, he was sort of like a unicorn,’ writes Mrs Obama, looking back on her courtship days with Barack.…

[Credit: Julie Edwards]

Mark Kermode: I longed to be a pop star

27 October 2018 9:00 am

In the 1970s, when Mark Kermode first picked up an instrument, the UK record business was a very different place.…

Jeffrey Bernard and Christopher Howse among drinkers at the Coach and Horses. Norman Balon presides. Credit: Rex Features

‘You don’t want to end up like us’: How I got out of Soho just in time

15 September 2018 9:00 am

On the one hand, I am supremely qualified to review this book. In 1984, bored beyond endurance after graduating with…

Alan Johnson. Credit Getty Images

Alan Johnson: the rock and roll years

15 September 2018 9:00 am

We’ve had Alan Johnson the lad from the slums of north Kensington, Alan Johnson the postman and Alan Johnson Member…

Pippin Star, a heifer from the Wampler herd in Virginia

The horrors of rewilding

8 September 2018 9:00 am

This unusual book begins with an account of the author’s ten-year love affair with dairy farming and an attempt ‘to…

‘A Connoisseur’ by Thomas Rowlandson

It’s time to rehabilitate the art connoisseur

18 August 2018 9:00 am

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

4 August 2018 9:00 am

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?

4 August 2018 9:00 am

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

4 August 2018 9:00 am

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

30 June 2018 9:00 am

What makes a barrister famous? At one time, many of the best advocates were also prominent politicians, whose day job…

Steven Spurrier at the launch of Wine — A Way of Life. Credit Getty Images

How Steven Spurrier enraged the French — and was never forgiven

23 June 2018 9:00 am

Fine wine rarely makes it into the public consciousness, but one event in 1976 has proved of perennial interest: the…

Sally Bayley. Credit: Alice Sholto-Douglas

Dickens and Agatha Christie made my childhood bearable

23 June 2018 9:00 am

Girl with Dove is a memoir by Sally Bayley, a writer who teaches at Oxford University, of growing up in…

Bactrian camels in the Khongoryn Els sand dunes of the Gobi Desert

The Empty Quarter is a great refuge for lonely hearts

2 June 2018 9:00 am

Here’s a treat for desert lovers. William Atkins, author of the widely admired book The Moor, has wisely exchanged the…