memoir
Afua Hirsch: Brit(ish) review - essential reading on identitySunday, 04 February 2018
Usually extracts in newspapers should stimulate the appetite of the reader to get with it; this is a rare moment when the glimpses afforded to Afua Hirsch’s Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging have peculiarly maligned a complex and amply... Read more... |
David Lodge: Writer’s Luck - A Memoir 1976-1991 review - literary days, in detailSunday, 14 January 2018
Metaphor, metonymy, simile and synecdoche, anyone? FR Leavis, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Derrida, Frank Kermode? If any of this, and more, turns you on, this lengthy memoir will be irresistible. It is almost a day-by-day account of 15 years of the... Read more... |
Jaron Lanier: Dawn of the New Everything review - pioneer of virtual reality tells his storySunday, 17 December 2017
Jaron Lanier has quite a story to tell. From a teenage flute-playing goat-herd in New Mexico to an “intense dreamer”, and a maths student capable of arguing, about films for example, with “supremacist. Borgesian flair”, then onwards and upwards,... Read more... |
Tina Brown: The Vanity Fair Diaries 1983-1992 review - portrait of an era of glitz and excessSunday, 19 November 2017
Tina Brown’s first Christmas issue of Vanity Fair in 1984 had this to say about “the sulky, Elvisy” Donald Trump: “…he’s a brass act. And he owns his own football team. And he thinks he should negotiate arms control agreements with the Soviet Union... Read more... |
The Best of AA Gill review - posthumous words collectedSunday, 12 November 2017
Word wizard. Grammar bully. Sentence shark. AA Gill didn’t play fair by syntax: he pounced on it, surprising it into splendid shapes. And who cared when he wooed readers with anarchy and aplomb? Hardly uncontroversial, let alone inoffensive (he... Read more... |
Peggy Seeger: First Time Ever - A Memoir, review - a remarkable lifeSunday, 22 October 2017
Seeger. A name to strike sparks with almost anyone, whether or not they have an interest in folk music, a catch-all term about which Peggy Seeger and her creative and life partner Ewan MacColl (they didn’t actually marry until a decade before his... Read more... |
Orhan Pamuk: Istanbul, Memories and the City review – a masterpiece upgradedSunday, 01 October 2017
Along with Balzac’s Paris and Dickens’s London, Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul now ranks as one of the most illustrious author-trademarked cities in literary history. Yet, as Turkey’s Nobel laureate told me during a Southbank Centre interview last month, he... Read more... |
Claire Tomalin: A Life of My Own review - the biographer on herselfSunday, 24 September 2017
The title says it all, or at least quite a lot. Luminously intelligent, an exceptionally hard worker, bilingual in French, a gifted biographer, Claire Tomalin has been at the heart of the literati glitterati all her working life. Here she turns her... Read more... |
Extract: Peter Brook - Tip of the Tongue: Reflections on Language and MeaningSunday, 10 September 2017
A long time ago when I was very young, a voice hidden deep within me whispered, "Don’t take anything for granted. Go and see for yourself." This little nagging murmur has led me to so many journeys, so many explorations, trying to live together... Read more... |
Sigrid Rausing: Mayhem review - you want it darker?Sunday, 03 September 2017
There is fictional Nordic noir. And then there is this, the real thing. Subject matter really couldn’t be much darker than that of Mayhem: A Memoir in which publisher, philanthropist and heiress Sigrid Rausing gives her perspective on her younger... Read more... |
Chris Patten: First Confession - A Sort of Memoir review - remembrances of government and powerSunday, 02 July 2017
It’s 25 years since Chris Patten lost his seat as Conservative MP for Bath. The 1992 election was called by an embattled prime minister, bruised by the Maastricht Treaty (remember “the bastards”?). Neil Kinnock had been expected to win, Labour ahead... Read more... |
Elif Batuman: The Idiot review - memories of student life and travels meanderSunday, 11 June 2017
University, anyone? Student days? If you were ever an undergraduate, who does not remember the simultaneous sense of dislocation and excitement, the feeling of the familiar combined with a heady awareness that we might fall off a cliff,... Read more... |
