Book review – memoir
A good man at the 1970s BBC
When I saw this book, a biography of Huw Wheldon, who was managing director of BBC Television between 1968 and…
When mother killed the plumber — and Nellie Melba came round to sing
Here’s a pair of little books — one even littler than the other — by Robin Dalton (née Eakin), a…
Nostalgia and nihilism
‘Gilded doorknobs,’ spits a Party diehard as she contemplates the blessings of the Soviet Union’s collapse. ‘Is this freedom?’ Dozens…
No place for sissies among the Bridge Ladies of Connecticut
Not a single line of this highly distinctive memoir happens out of doors. All of it takes place in rooms:…
Teffi: from Russia with laughs
‘Ah! Scrubbing the deck! My childhood dream! As a child I had once seen a sailor hosing the deck with…
A Feelgood fairy story
When I wrote for the NME as a schoolgirl in the 1980s, it was recognised that there were musicians who…
The deceptive charm of the bourgeoisie
Glimpsing the title of Lynsey Hanley’s absorbing new book as it fell out of the jiffy bag, I found myself…
The hip-hop intellectual from inner-city Baltimore
The author of the bestseller Between the World and Me and recipient of a MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ last year, Ta-Nehisi…
The race from the Big C to the Big D
The ‘journey’ — at least the one played out in public — begins with an announcement that you are incurable.…
All at sea — trying hard to stay afloat
‘This happens to other people.’ The Guardian journalist Decca Aitkenhead says she had heard the phrase countless times, interviewing the…
A pilgrim’s progress to Santiago
In his friendly and beguiling voice, Jean-Christophe Rufin explains (in a way that reminded me of the pre-journey relish of…
How to have your cake — and not eat it
Sitting at her desk at the BBC in March 2006, researching a documentary about the Olympic Games, Caroline Jones pressed…
Love like Salt: a memoir of music, motherhood and magical thinking
Helen Stevenson’s daughter Clara has cystic fibrosis. Love Like Salt is an account of living with the disease, but it…
Are all moody teenagers potential Columbine killers?
On an April morning in 1999, two teenagers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, walked into Columbine High School in Colorado…
Olivia Laing: homeless and tempest-tossed in the Big Apple
Like a lot of people, Olivia Laing came to New York to join a lover. Like a lot of people,…
The polite anti-Semitism of 20th-century Britain
Though it seems to begin as an affectionate memorial to his maternal grandparents, a testimonial to a rare and perfectly…
Jhumpa Lahiri's new tongue
Imagine you’re an unknown young writer whose first collection of stories wins the Pulitzer prize. Your first novel is filmed,…
Coming of age in New York
I read this, Meg Rosoff’s first novel for adults (though her previous fiction, aimed at teenagers, is widely enjoyed by…
Charles Foster: ‘I need to be more of a badger’
Being a Beast is an impassioned and proselytising work of philosophy based on a spectacular approach to nature writing. That…
Enraptured by raptors
The fewer birds there are, the more books about them, particularly of the literary kind. Helen MacDonald’s H is for…
Joan Bakewell: on socks, fridge magnets, teddy bears and such stuff
I don’t know if this counts as name-dropping, but I recently interviewed a boyhood friend of Elvis Presley’s in Tupelo,…
A deadly role reversal
Who would you trust to take a blade to your brain? Medical schools and hospitals, arbiters of this outrageous intimacy,…
The Luangwa is far from being a happy valley
Simon Barnes opens with a presumably true idea, that we are all in search of our own versions of paradise…
Carly Simon: funniest, most sexually blunt star of her generation
I usually dread the final 15 minutes of a celebrity interview: the awkward section during which the writer must steer…
In and out of the drink
‘If I were to go mad,’ Amy Liptrot writes in her memoir of alcoholism and the Orkneys, ‘It would come…
