Shop Girl by Mary Portas
Review by Annabel Mary Portas is one of those TV presenter/gurus you either love or find profoundly irritating. I love her and her championing of the high street and independent…
Review by Annabel Mary Portas is one of those TV presenter/gurus you either love or find profoundly irritating. I love her and her championing of the high street and independent…
Reviewed by Laura Marriott “I always thought it would be classy to not kiss and tell … but after a while you just get sick of having other people trying…
Translated by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, Anne Marie Jackson and Irina Steinberg Reviewed by Karen Langley The Russian Revolution and ensuing Civil War were amongst the most brutal conflicts of…
Reviewed by Simon I am always unable to pass on the chance to read a Slightly Foxed Edition and, having re-loved 84, Charing Cross Road in the last issue of Shiny New…
Translated by Carol Brown Janeway Reviewed by Karen Langley There are many things we have to thank Pushkin Press for (Gaito Gazdanov, Teffi, gorgeously produced books, to name just a…
Reviewed by Harriet I can’t tell you how excited I was when I heard there was finally going to be a proper biography of the great crime writer Josephine Tey,…
Reviewed by Barbara Howard Quoted in this book is Charlotte Brontë’s great aim and ambition in life ‘to be forever known’ as a poet, which she confided in a letter…
Reviewed by Victoria In 1965, shortly before Christmas, a young, ambitious mother of two children on the brink of publishing her first book of sociology let herself into a friend’s…
Reviewed by Hayley Anderton I discovered Gavin Maxwell’s books when newly exiled from a rural Scottish childhood. The first of his books that I found was Harpoon at a Venture. Drawn…
Reviewed by Simon This marks the third biography I’ve reviewed in Shiny New Books that is about a major figure in my doctoral thesis – three out of three of…
Reviewed by Simon This is the reason that small reprint publishers exist. Who else would print this attractive slim volume – only 63 pages – and bring back into print…
Reviewed by Simon The premise for My Katherine Mansfield Project is admittedly rather niche. If one is not already a fan of Kirsty Gunn, then one had better be a fan of…
Reviewed by Rob Spence A. David Moody’s monumental biography of Ezra Pound reaches its conclusion with this third and final volume. Having taken the story of Pound’s increasingly erratic life…
Reviewed by Ali Hope I read very few non-fiction books these days, but this was a book that ticked a number of boxes for me. I do like books about…
Reviewed by Harriet No one becomes a criminal barrister to make large sums of money. A criminal practice has always been the least well paid and of the lowest status…
Reviewed by Victoria It was from a friend that Julia Blackburn first heard about John Craske, a Norfolk fisherman who became a painter and an embroiderer when ill health made…
Reviewed by Simon Oliver Sacks’ works are pretty much the only non-fiction books I read that aren’t about literature; for over thirty years he has been writing accessible books about…
Reviewed by Annabel It’s hard to know where to start in writing about this memoir. I could be glib and say it’s about the healing power of classical music, which…
Reviewed by Victoria Sorting through her mother’s things after her death in 2002, Kate Grenville came across an exercise book with her mother’s handwriting in it: ‘I have often thought…
Reviewed by Simon Sarah Knights claims that she wrote her biography of David Garnett partly to restore his reputation – not as a writer, but as a person. His wife’s…
Reviewed by Annabel What do you do when you seriously lose your reading mojo? I tend to retreat into a palate-cleansing thriller to get mine back, but I’ve never had…
Reviewed by Victoria Writing a family memoir can be a tricky business in these days of ever more sensitively judgemental readers. There’s a subset who disapproves of anything that smacks…
Reviewed by Lyn Baines In an Afterword to this new edition of George Sanders’ memoir, his niece, Ulla Watson, describes him as the opposite to the cads and bounders he played…
Reviewed by Annabel Subtitled ‘Wonderings and Reflections on Growing Up Gracefully’, All I Know Now is part memoir, part advice guide for teens, by one of the big stars of vlogging. Carrie…