Family history
The cosmopolitan spirit of the Middle East vanished with the Ottomans
One of the most depressing vignettes in Michael Vatikiotis’s agreeably meandering account of his cosmopolitan family’s experiences in the Near…
From family home to mausoleum: the Musée Nissim Camondo
The potter and author Edmund de Waal revisits familiar terrain at an angle in his third book, Letters to Camondo.…
Family secrets: Life Sentences, by Billy O’Callaghan, reviewed
Despite innovative work by younger writers, there remains a prominent strain in Irish literature of what we might call the…
Aunt Munca’s murky past
Kiss Myself Goodbye. It sounds a bit like a William Boyd novel. It looks likea William Boyd novel, too: the…
Treasures or clutter? The problem of knowing what to keep
Every so often the past makes a pass at you. An old school report, a train ticket, a curl from…
When six of her 12 children went mad, Mimi Galvin did her best to make to light of it
Don Galvin and Mimi Blayney married in December 1944. It was a shotgun wedding. They had been high school sweethearts.…
An intellectual dynasty: the Darwins, Wedgwoods and their notable intermarriages
Readers of Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage will remember that its author set out to write a life of…
The best way to escape my abusive family was to write novels
Early on in Amy Tan’s 1989 bestseller, The Joy Luck Club, a Chinese concubine slices a chunk of flesh from…
More family history from Knole and Sissinghurst
In deciding to write a book about her forebears and herself, Juliet Nicolson follows in their footsteps. Given that her…
David Pryce-Jones settles old scores
The geological title of this unhappy memoir is an apt metaphor for fissures in the relationships between individuals of David…
My mad gay grandfather and me
Mirabel Cecil on Lord Berners’s volatile ménage — as surprising and colourful as his famous dyed doves
The Etonian peer who became an assistant to a Mexican commie
The lefty hereditary peer has few equals as a figure of fun, in life or literature. The late Tony Benn…
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…
