Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir, by Marina Warner
Review by Helen Parry In spring 1944 the English officer Esmond Warner attended a party in Bari hosted by a widow, Signora Terzulli, and her four beautiful daughters. One of…
The Muse by Nell Dunn
Review by Annabel There is a particular sub-genre of memoir that almost goes into biography but fundamentally remains a memoir. I’m talking about memoirs of friendships like Tracey Thorn’s latest…
Valentine Ackland: A Transgressive Life by Frances Bingham
Reviewed by Gill Davies This is a remarkable book about a remarkable woman. Valentine Ackland (1906-1969) was “transgressive” in so many ways. She was a cross-dressing lesbian; a communist from…
The Fighter Fell in Love: A Spanish Civil War Memoir by James R. Jump
Reviewed by Michael Eaude This is the memoir of a volunteer to the International Brigades, formed to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Jimmy Jump (1916-1990) was a…
Whitman in Washington by Kenneth Price
Reviewed by Rob Spence Kenneth Price is the co-director of the Walt Whitman Archive, and one of the leading experts on the poet, having published widely on his work. This…
Circles and Squares: The Lives and Loves of the Hampstead Modernists by Caroline Maclean
Review by Karen Langley The early part of the 20th century was a period when modern art was flourishing. New ways of living were being explored, abstract art forms were…
Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker
Reviewed by Lory Widmer-Hess Schizophrenic. The very word is a trigger for aversion, a signal to run away, with its spiky, spluttered consonants and imprisoned vowels, four foreign syllables meaning…
Heavy Light: A Journey through Madness, Mania and Healing by Horatio Clare
Reviewed by Peter Reason It was on a family skiing holiday that Horatio Clare finally went mad. This was the culmination of a period of high activity and stress, coupled…
Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1918-1938, edited by Simon Heffer
Reviewed by Elaine Simpson-Long When I was a little girl I kept a diary. It was pink and fluffy with a lock and a key, easily broken if anybody had…
Keats by Lucasta Miller
Reviewed by Harriet It may not have escaped your attention that 2021 is the 200th anniversary of the death of John Keats. Yes, on 23 February 1821, the 25-year-old poet…
Cary Grant, the Making of a Hollywood Legend by Mark Glancy
Review by Elaine Simpson-Long There is a scene in Charade, a 1964 film which Cary Grant made with Audrey Hepburn, in which the following exchange takes place: Reggie Lambert (Hepburn)…
The Panic Years by Nell Frizzell
Reviewed by Harriet ‘Every millennial woman should have this on her bookshelf’ says Pandora Sykes on the front of Nell Frizzell’s new book. New in the sense that it’s just…
She Come By It Natural by Sarah Smarsh
Reviewed by Basil Ransome Davies Forty years ago I spent some time on the motel strip at Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, to do some hiking in the magnificent Smoky Mountains. At…
Biography & Memoir, Diaries
Ecology & Environment, Natural World
History & Politics, Feminism, Sociology
Non Fiction
Thin Places by Kerri ní Dochartaigh
Review by Peter Reason I have been totally absorbed in Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s Thin Places since it arrived in the morning mail and I read in the Preface: ‘The right…
Chauvo-Feminism: On Sex, Power and #MeToo by Sam Mills
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth Remember the 1990s? It was a decade where lads’ mags decorated magazine shelves in supermarkets and where Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus with…
This Time Next Year We’ll be Laughing by Jacqueline Winspear
Reviewed by Harriet Jacqueline Winspear was born in 1955. Her debut novel – the first of her award-winning Maisie Dobbs mysteries – was published in 2003. Counting on my fingers…
I Don’t Want to Go to the Taj Mahal: Stories of a Birmingham Boy by Charlie Hill
Review by Eleanor Updegraff It can be difficult to get other people interested in your life. Many authors have tried, many have failed – often simply by taking themselves too…
The Fragments of My Father by Sam Mills
Reviewed by Harriet Sam Mills’ ‘memoir of madness, love, and being a carer’ starts on a Friday night in early 2016. Sam’s father has been locked in a bathroom for two…
Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel, by Rachel Holmes
Reviewed by Rob Spence I recently watched the Ethiopia episode of Afua Hirsch’s excellent series African Renaissance, in which I was startled to see an interview with Sylvia Pankhurst’s daughter-in-law,…
Michael Tippett, The Biography by Oliver Soden
Reviewed by Peter Hobson This is a very long, extensively referenced account of the life and music of Michael Tippett, a composer who is often regarded as someone who never…
Journey through a Tragicomic Century: The Absurd Life of Hasso Grabner by Francis Nenik
Translated by Katy Derbyshire Reviewed by Eleanor Updegraff This September sees the launch of V&Q Books, a brand-new publishing imprint with the mission of translating ‘remarkable writing from Germany’ for…
Horse Crazy: The Story of a Woman and a World in Love with an Animal by Sarah Maslin Nir
Review by Liz Dexter Sarah Maslin Nir is a staff reporter for the New York Times who, by her own admission, has sought out horses wherever she’s travelled to write…
Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Natasha Trethewey is an English professor and former U.S. Poet Laureate familiar to me from Native Guard (2006), her third of five poetry collections – an…
Grayson Perry by Jacky Klein & Grayson Perry
Reviewed by Liz Dexter This sumptuous book, that has a lot of content, in terms of both text and image, is a real treat – the only book so far…