One critical moment represents the core theme of this important memoir. In 2001, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web (WWW), asks Jean-François Abramatic, a pioneering computer scientist, whether he thinks that civilisation and liberal democracy are ‘locked in’. Abramatic responds optimistically about civilisation’s future now that ‘liberal democracy is so strong, and […]
Arundhati Roy grew up, as she writes in her new memoir, with a feeling of constant dread, a ‘cold moth on my heart’. She both loved and feared Mary, her eccentric and ruthless mother, who, when Roy was three, had walked out on her father and had started a school in a village in Kerala, […]
In this entertaining autobiography we enter the posh world of Harvey Nichols. In the 1980s and 1990s, during the department store’s heyday, Mary Portas was in charge of window displays. It was she who landed ‘Harvey Nicks’ its defining role in Absolutely Fabulous, the 1990s sitcom satirising fashion types. AbFab was of course the hugest […]
Four years ago, the Asian-American author Jeremy Atherton Lin’s debut, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, won the US National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. Deep House is a sort of sequel, a similar combination of memoir and non-fiction reporting. It is dedicated this time not to gay subculture but to the subject of […]
It’s shocking to realise that supreme flâneur Geoff Dyer, whom I had presumed to be ageless, is well into his seventh decade. Christ, we are all getting so old. But the surprise of ageing is how much closer one seems to the beginning of things. The whole of life is revealed as a learning circle, […]
While esteeming John Harris for his regular gig on The Guardian’s op-ed page, older readers will probably remember him as a Nineties-era music journalist. This particular older reader first came across him all of thirty years ago when he was cutting his teeth at Q and the New Musical Express. In those days, music journalism […]
Food historian Bee Wilson knows that thinking and writing about meals are often the way we talk about all sorts of other things. Emotions that cannot be expressed in words can be poured into a lovingly made dish. And she has a vivid sense, too, of the way that the implements of the kitchen – […]
There are many idioms in Judaeo-Iraqi Arabic involving the heart. If you upset someone, they might say you’re chopping onions on their heart (yethrem basal all ras efadi), a term similar in meaning to rubbing salt into the wound. It might be said ruefully or as a joke. Samantha Ellis grew up in London and […]
Can Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair from 1992 to 2017, possibly be that nice? His friends – and there are lots, going back forever – say he is. And he comes across in this delicious autobiography as almost excessively level-headed and bright-side-of-lifeish. A friend who knew him back then and understood the world of Condé Nast, producers of a raft of glossy magazines for hyper-aspirationals, tells me that the culture at Vanity Fair was as cheerful as
The author of the frankly startling The Loves of My Life has written some thirty books, including biographies, novellas, memoirs, poetry and over a dozen novels, some elegiac, many celebratory and all devoted to his fervid absorption with, and pursuit of, the male penis. Among Edmund White’s earliest achievements was co-authoring The Joy of Gay […]
‘My grandmother grew up brushing her teeth with radioactive toothpaste’ is the arresting opening sentence of Joe Dunthorne’s family memoir. The reason for such a strange practice? Her father was an experimental chemist, and he was enthusiastic about the possibilities of radiation. His name was Siegfried Merzbacher and he was director of a secret laboratory […]
‘Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?’ asked the 17th-century priest and poet George Herbert. ‘He is a brittle crazy glass.’ The Reverend Fergus Butler-Gallie asks this old and difficult question in a thoroughly modern way. His new book, Touching Cloth, a memoir that describes his first year in ministry following ordination, explores the […]
The nearest I’ve come to Argentina is reading Far Away and Long Ago, a haunting and often surprisingly violent memoir (it was written in Bayswater when the author was an invalid during the First World War) by W H Hudson of his mid-19th-century childhood in a ranch house overlooking the River Plata and Argentina’s vast […]
‘I do not want to be good,’ declared Martha Gellhorn. ‘I wish to be hell on wheels, or dead.’ Gellhorn is one of Sara Wheeler’s heroines, and something of these feisty and defiant sentiments runs through her memoir, which is both very enjoyable and impressive. Wheeler is remarkable for the sheer amount of travelling she […]
Publishers’ biographies of poets tend to be brief and cursory, amounting to not much more than a list of previous publications. Because ‘the work speaks for itself’, you see. Don Paterson’s 1993 debut, Nil Nil, stated merely that he was born in Dundee in 1963, moved to London in 1984 and won an Eric Gregory […]
Two Sisters comes thirty years after the publication of Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father? This account of the relationship between a bluff, domineering yet loving Yorkshire GP and his bolshy, bookish son, and of the physical details of his father’s death (it should have been called ‘And When Did You […]
Any memoir of the first twenty years of one’s life runs the risk of glibly sentimentalising the past and assuming that trivial remembered details or moments merit wider circulation. Stephen Hough doesn’t altogether avoid these traps – do we really need to know about the antics of his guinea pig, the menu at a long-defunct […]
There is a particular problem that books detailing an experience of a debilitating malady pose for the reviewer. For an author who has already undergone some gruelling trial, the slings and arrows from a (generally hale) critic might so easily become the last straw in a catalogue of miseries that the sensitive reviewer will be inclined to hold any
It’s no disrespect to John Walsh’s elegant and elegiac memoir to say that forty years ago, during the earlier part of the period it covers, books like this were ten a penny – or at any rate in their remaindered form £2.99 a throw. They had titles like As I Walked Down New Grub Street […]
Here are two books by academics. They are memoirs of reading, or rather they are books about reading, writing and storytelling with sections of autobiography. Both are about death as well as living, and at least in part about how literature can make some consoling sense of the afflictions or demands of the body. Elizabeth […]
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Literary Review - For People Who Devour Books
Book reviews by Philip Womack
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Juggling balls, dead birds, lottery tickets, hypochondriac journalists. All the makings of an excellent collection. Loved Camille Bordas’s One Sun Only in the latest @Lit_Review
Natalie Perman - Normal People
Natalie Perman: Normal People - One Sun Only by Camille Bordas
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Despite adopting a pseudonym, George Sand lived much of her life in public view.
Lucasta Miller asks whether Sand’s fame has obscured her work.
Lucasta Miller - Life, Work & Adoration
Lucasta Miller: Life, Work & Adoration - Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand by Fiona Sampson
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