Memoir

The nerdy obsessive who became the world’s richest man

8 February 2025 9:00 am

Seen by fellow pupils as an obnoxious loner, Bill Gates was a rebellious teenager, challenging his teachers and ‘at war’ with his parents

The strange potency of cheap perfume

8 February 2025 9:00 am

Adelle Stripe has constructed a memoir around 18 key fragrances, but it is the Body Shop’s cheery Dewberry that evokes her worst teenage experience

Red-letter days for Gilbert & George

18 January 2025 9:00 am

After a successful show in Moscow in 1990, the odd couple went on to even greater triumph in China three years later, as the long-suffering curator of both exhibitions describes

The next best thing to visiting a really clever friend in New York

18 January 2025 9:00 am

Vivian Gornick’s memoir of life in the city in the 1960s and 1970s is rich in anecdote and dialogues with waspish friends and neighbours

Four legs good, two legs bad – the philosophy of Gerald Durrell

7 December 2024 9:00 am

From a young man determined to protect the world’s vulnerable species, Durrell became in middle age someone who loathed the species of which he was a member

Was Graham Brady really the awesome power-broker he imagines?

7 December 2024 9:00 am

His kiss-and-tell memoir implies that the past five Tory prime ministers all feared him. But the longtime Chair of the 1922 Committee was in reality no ‘kingmaker’

A rare combination of humour and pathos: the sublimely talented Neil Innes

7 December 2024 9:00 am

The musician and parodist, whose mantra was ‘not to say no when there’s a way to say yes’, had a gift for creating happiness in private as well as public, as his widow poignantly attests

The good soldier Maczek – a war hero betrayed

7 December 2024 9:00 am

After fighting for the Allies in Hungary, France, Belgium and Holland, Stanislaw Maczek finds himself stripped of his Polish citizenship as a result of the Yalta conference

Besieged Odesa is still caught in a conflict of identities

30 November 2024 9:00 am

Older citizens have identified with Russia all their lives – and Russian is still commonly spoken everywhere. But young Odesans are now using more Ukrainian as a symbol of resistance

A father’s love: Childish Literature, by Alejandro Zambra, reviewed

30 November 2024 9:00 am

The Chilean writer contributes obliquely to the fledgling genre of fatherhood literature, combining family vignettes with literary criticism and a ‘diary’ addressed to his infant son

Fortitude, emotional intelligence and wit – the defining qualities of Simon Russell Beale

30 November 2024 9:00 am

The Shakespearean actor has taken on 18 of the great roles since his first gig at the RSC in 1985 and recalls them with insight, sensitivity and a sharp passion for language

Seeking forgiveness for gluttony, sloth and other deadly sins

30 November 2024 9:00 am

The neurologist Guy Leschziner explores the medical conditions that might underlie extremes of human behaviour in a fascinating study that combines biology and psychology

Surviving an abusive mother-daughter relationship

23 November 2024 9:00 am

In a dialogue with her younger self, the Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis tries to make sense of her traumatic upbringing at the hands of a repressive, coercive mother

The shame of being an alcoholic mother

9 November 2024 9:00 am

Julia Hamilton and her daughter Arabella Byrne share their experiences of an addiction that seemed ‘baked into them like a curse’, and the special stigma they felt attached to them

From public bar to cocktail bar: books for the discerning drinker

2 November 2024 9:00 am

There’s something for all tastes this year, whether poetic meditations on the pub, advice on wines for extended cellaring or recipes for new-wave martinis

And still the colonial memoirs keep coming…

19 October 2024 9:00 am

Peter Godwin’s third volume to date – of a family in various stages of decline after leaving their African homeland – is redeemed by its vivid evocations and erudition

How ballet lessons transformed Princess Diana

5 October 2024 9:00 am

The choreographer Anne Allan not only indulged the princess’s love of dance in weekly one-to-one sessions but also became her longstanding confidante

The misery of growing up in a utopian community

5 October 2024 9:00 am

Susanna Crossman recalls her childhood of bullying and sexual molestation in an Orwellian dystopia supposedly devoted to freedom and equality

Man of mystery and friend of the Cambridge spies

5 October 2024 9:00 am

Details of Baron Talbot of Malahide’s attempts to clean up the mess left by his one-time mentor Guy Burgess are still conveniently exempted from the Freedom of Information Act

The hare-raising experience that changed my life

28 September 2024 9:00 am

When Chloe Dalton adopts an abandoned new-born leveret, she soon finds her domestic routine radically altered

Iris Apfel’s talent to amaze

24 August 2024 9:00 am

Instantly recognisable with her cascades of necklaces and startling colours (‘pastels make me nervous’), the interior decorator would achieve real fame with a Met exhibition in 2005

Is it wrong to try to ‘cure’ autism?

17 August 2024 9:00 am

Do autistic individuals not feel empathy? What is the right treatment for an autistic child? These are just some of the questions discussed in Virginia Bovell’s passionate, informative memoir

Her weird name was the least of Moon Unit Zappa’s problems

17 August 2024 9:00 am

Frank and Gail Zappa’s eldest child describes how the endless battles between her manipulative mother and misogynist father in the 1970s blight the family to this day

Imperfections in wood can make for the loveliest carvings

17 August 2024 9:00 am

Often beneath the surface of a knobbly lump bulging from the side of a tree ‘a myriad of swirling, almost impossibly beautiful clusters is hiding’, bursting with creative possibility