Memoir

A dying doctor’s last words

27 August 2022 9:00 am

Facing up to the prospect of one’s own mortality is always jarring; but when you’ve spent your life trying, and…

In search of the peripatetic philosopher Theophrastus

20 August 2022 9:00 am

Publishers lately seem to have got the idea that otherwise uncommercial subjects might be rendered sexy if presented with a…

A gay journey of self-discovery

6 August 2022 9:00 am

Seán Hewitt, born in 1990, realised that he was gay at a very early age. ‘A kind, large woman’ who…

Solving the mystery of mass almost ruined Peter Higgs’s life

6 August 2022 9:00 am

In 1993 William Waldegrave, the science minister, was looking into a project being planned on the continent. Cern, the European…

A poet finds home in a patch of nettles

6 August 2022 9:00 am

Towards the end of a long relationship – ‘resolved to have a conversation about the Future, which meant Separating’ –…

The pleasures – and perils – of getting on your bike

30 July 2022 9:00 am

Jody Rosen lives and cycles in Brooklyn, which makes him what the Mexican essayist Julio Torri calls ‘a suicide apprentice’.…

The lost world of the Karoo

30 July 2022 9:00 am

Julia Blackburn’s Dreaming the Karoo is the diary of a very bad year: from March 2020, when a research trip…

Is self-loathing the British disease?

30 July 2022 9:00 am

Whatever one thinks of the government’s plans to send refugees to Rwanda, it was amusing to see this country’s left…

Where does a mother’s history end and a daughter’s begin?

23 July 2022 9:00 am

Where does a mother’s history end and a daughter’s begin?

Naples will never escape the shadow of Vesuvius

9 July 2022 9:00 am

Naples, the tatterdemalion capital of the Italian south, is said to be awash with heroin. Chinese-run morphine refineries on its…

The great breakfast dilemma: should baked beans be part of a full English?

9 July 2022 9:00 am

A popular pastime in Britain is to post one’s breakfast on social media for strangers to pass judgment on bacon…

All about my mother: Édouard Louis’s latest family saga

9 July 2022 9:00 am

Shunned by his father and his peers because of his homosexuality, Édouard Louis (born Eddy Bellegueule in 1992) left his village…

Michael Beloff QC drops names – but they’re not the ones we’re curious about

2 July 2022 9:00 am

‘The law,’ according to W.S. Gilbert’s Lord Chancellor, ‘is the true embodiment of everything that’s excellent’ and, by common consent,…

We could all once tell bird’s-foot trefoil from rosebay willowherb

2 July 2022 9:00 am

‘There are a great many ways of holding on to our sanity amid the vices and follies of the world,’…

Ethel, Ella and all that jazz: the soundtrack of a Chicago childhood

25 June 2022 9:00 am

Margo Jefferson’s Constructing a Nervous System compresses memoir and cultural criticism into one slim, explosive volume, and in doing so…

Piloting a Boeing Dreamliner can be less than dreamy

18 June 2022 9:00 am

Mark Vanhoenacker dreams of my nightmares. Ever since he was a young boy, he fantasised about piloting airplanes. Ever since…

Jarvis Cocker measures out his life in attic junk

18 June 2022 9:00 am

If you were hoping for an autobiography this isn’t it. Jarvis Cocker calls it ‘an inventory’ and insists: ‘This is…

From teenage delinquent to man of letters: James Campbell’s remarkable career

11 June 2022 9:00 am

The great age of the Scottish autodidact must have ended a century ago, but it had a prodigious impact while…

What do Beethoven, D.H. Lawrence and George Best have in common?

11 June 2022 9:00 am

This is not a book about tennis. Roger Federer appears early on, trailed by the obligatory question ‘When will he…

Musings on harmony, melody and rhythm

4 June 2022 9:00 am

Every Good Boy Does Fine – a banal phrase that also just happens to be the key to limitless wonder.…

Reflections on water in the Middle East

28 May 2022 9:00 am

These Bodies of Water begins dramatically (as befits a book derived from Sabrina Mahfouz’s Royal Court show A History of…

The history of Nazism in small objects

21 May 2022 9:00 am

‘I can’t cook,’ writes the historian Karina Urbach, ‘which is probably why it took me so long to realise that…

Poor parenting is at the root of our failing schools

30 April 2022 9:00 am

When it comes to education, I’m in two minds, maybe three. I was sent to private schools, including, for my…

Jonathan Bate weaves a memoir around madness in English literature

23 April 2022 9:00 am

There is a trend for books in which academics write personally about their engagement with literature. Examples include Lara Feigel’s…

The spycop debacle is another nail in the Met’s coffin

9 April 2022 9:00 am

In 2010, Mark Kennedy, a tattooed social justice warrior, was exposed as an undercover police officer. In this guise he…