The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley by Diana Petre
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…
Summer Before the Dark by Volker Weidermann
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…
Josephine Tey: A Life by Jennifer Morag Henderson
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,…
Charlotte Brontë: A Life, by Claire Harman
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…
A Woman on the Edge of Time by Jeremy Gavron
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…
The House of Elrig by Gavin Maxwell
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…
Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography by Claire Harman
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…
Letters to the Sphinx by Oscar Wilde
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…
My Katherine Mansfield Project by Kirsty Gunn
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…
Ezra Pound: Poet, Volume III by A. David Moody
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…
Renishaw Hall: The Story of the Sitwells by Desmond Seward
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…
Jeremy Hutchinson’s Case Histories by Thomas Grant
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…
Threads: The Delicate Life of John Craske by Julia Blackburn
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…
On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks
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…
Instrumental by James Rhodes
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…
One Life: My Mother’s Story by Kate Grenville
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…
Bloomsbury’s Outsider: A Life of David Garnett by Sarah Knights
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…
The Year of Reading Dangerously by Andy Miller
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…
Leaving Before the Rains Come by Alexandra Fuller
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…
Memoirs of a Professional Cad by George Sanders
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…
All I Know Now by Carrie Hope Fletcher
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…
Basil Street Blues by Michael Holroyd
Reviewed by Simon It takes a certain sort of bravado to assume that your family will be interesting to people who don’t know you. Not just your family in connection…
Researching ‘A Curious Friendship, by Anna Thomasson
I first came across Rex Whistler some years ago at Plas Newydd on Anglesey. There he had painted his largest and most famous mural, begun in 1936. The dining room…
A Curious Friendship by Anna Thomasson
Reviewed by Simon The subtitle of Anna Thomasson’s biography, A Curious Friendship: the Story of a Bluestocking and a Bright Young Thing, belies the publisher’s expectations about the reputations of its…