Book review – memoir
A singer’s joys and woes: like her heroine Dusty Springfield, Tracey Thorn has trouble coming to terms with her beautiful voice
Look up Tracey Thorn’s live performances with Everything But The Girl or Massive Attack on You Tube and you’ll find…
The New Yorker’s grammar rules (and how to break them)
‘I had had a fantasy for years about owning a dairy farm,’ says Mary Norris, as she considers her career…
From diplomacy to disillusion with the Dalai Lama’s big brother
Can there ever have been another book in which one of the authors (Anne Thurston in this case) so effectively…
Dreaming of a golden future: there will always be people willing to sacrifice all in the pursuit of gold
In 2008, the price of gold lofted above $1,000 an ounce for the first time in history, inspiring a rush…
Reading one book from every country in the world sounds like fun - until you come to North Korea
One day in 2011, while perusing her bookshelves, Ann Morgan realised her reading habits were (to her surprise) somewhat parochial.…
Emer O’Toole is a joyless bore compared with my heroine Caitlin Moran, says Julie Burchill
Looking at the brightly coloured front cover of this book, I felt cheerful; turning it over and seeing the word…
Alexandra’s Fuller’s parents are the stars even when their daughter is divorcing, in this sequel to the bestselling Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight
‘Double ouzo, hold the Coke,’ Mum ordered at the Mkushi Country Club bar, during spanikopita night. ‘My daughter’s a lesbian.’…
Touring America in Steinbeck’s footsteps
In 1960 John Steinbeck set off with his poodle Charley to drive around the United States in a truck equipped…
What Hanif Kureishi learned from being robbed by his accountant
Have you ever met a sane accountant? I ask, because one of the more striking sentences in A Theft runs:…
What Julie Burchill's ex-husband thinks of her new memoir
Unchosen is the journalist Julie Burchill’s account of how she — a bright and bratty working-class girl from Bristol —…
A woman who wears her homes like garments
Depending on your approach, home is where your heart is, where you hang your hat, or possibly where you hang…
From Trot to Thatcher: the life of Kika Markham
In a varied career, the actress Kika Markham has regularly played real-life charcters, including, on television, Mrs Thatcher — piquant…
Beer and skittles and Lucian Freud and Quentin Crisp – a Hampstead misery memoir
The rise of the ‘misery memoir’ describing abusive childhoods, followed by the I-was-a-teenage-druggie-alkie-gangbanger-tick-as-appropriate memoir, pushed into the shadows an older…
The case of the amnesiac autobiographer
In October 2002, 28-year-old David Stuart MacLean woke up at Hyderabad railway station. He was standing at the time, and…
The Australian literary icon who fooled her family
There aren’t many places you can get shouty about Proust without losing your job. The Lane Bookshop in Perth, Western…
The punk who inspired a generation of British woman to pick up a guitar
Viv Albertine is deservedly famous as the guitarist of the tumultuous, all-female English punk band The Slits. Their debut album,…
Narcotically-induced mischief in an urban wasteland
Fifteen minutes by rail from Paddington, Southall is a ‘Little India’ in the borough of Ealing. An ornate Hindu temple…
My desert island poet
If I had to be marooned on a desert island with a stranger, that stranger would be John Burnside. Not…
An escape to the country that became a struggle for Poland's soul
In 1993, John Borrell, a longtime foreign correspondent with no permanent home, decided to abandon journalism. Tired of writing about…
Gay Paree: food, feuds and phalluses – I mean, fallacies
In his preface to The Joy of Gay Sex (revised and expanded third edition), Edmund White praises the ‘kinkier’ aspects…
What other job lets you swear in front of your parents?
There aren’t many jobs that allow a nice middle-class Jewish boy to say ‘fuck’ in front of his parents. But…
A master craftsman of the anecdote
One of the many charms of this book is its sheer unexpectedness, which makes it hard to review, for to…
Middlemarch: the novel that reads you
The genesis of The Road to Middlemarch was a fine article in the New Yorker about Rebecca Mead’s unsuccessful search…
How to get around South Africa's many boundaries
There are writers whose prose style is so fluid, so easy, the reader feels as though he has been taken…
'One warm night in June 1917 I became the man who nearly killed the Kaiser'
Daniel Swift 1 March 2014 9:00 am
The traditional story told about the first world war is that it changed everything: that it was the end of…