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…
Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War by Mark Harris
Reviewed by Victoria In this outstanding work of cinema history, Mark Harris follows the fortunes of five big name Hollywood directors who enlisted in the wake of Pearl Harbour to…
The Reluctant Hostess by Ethelind Fearon
Reviewed by Simon I have a definite weakness for spoof etiquette guides and the like – such as Bed Manners, reviewed in the third issue of Shiny New Books – and…
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…
Great Shakespearean Actors: Burbage to Branagh by Stanley Wells
Reviewed by Harriet Stanley Wells has been described as ‘our greatest authority on Shakespeare’s life and work’. He’s Honorary President of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Emeritus Professor of Shakespeare Studies…
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat by Oliver Sacks
Reviewed by Simon It has been thirty years since Oliver Sacks’ most famous book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, was published and, while it does not need…
Creatures of a Day and Other Tales of Psychotherapy by Irvin D. Yalom
Reviewed by Victoria I am a huge fan of shrink lit, the small genre of books that feature psychotherapy, because they almost invariably explore and unpack some of the most…
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…
A Bird in the Hand by Diana Henry
Reviewed by Hayley Anderton Chicken recipes for every day and every mood. Chicken is hard to avoid these days. When I was a child it was a once a week…
Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure by Cédric Villani
Translated by Malcolm De Bevoise Review by Annabel It is a well-known fact that Stephen Hawking was persuaded to remove all the equations bar the single famous one, E =…
The Book of Margery Kempe
Translated by Anthony Bale Reviewed by Harriet Margery Kempe (c.1373-after 1439) was an extraordinary woman, and this is an extraordinary book. It’s often referred to as the first autobiography to…
Portrait Inside My Head by Phillip Lopate
Reviewed by Victoria Readers may recognise Phillip Lopate’s name from the anthologies of American essay writing for which he is the editor, though in fact he is a prolific essay…
The Nuns of Sant’ Ambrogio by Hubert Wolf
Translated by Ruth Martin Reviewed by Harriet This is certainly an extraordinary and fascinating book. Written by a celebrated German papal historian, it manages to combine highly academic ecclesiastical history…
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…
My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
Reviewed by Simon Slightly Foxed Editions often introduce me to books I know nothing about – hidden gems waiting to be unearthed – and that is wonderful. What they’ve done…
Where I’m Reading From by Tim Parks
Reviewed by Annabel Many of us who are booklovers enjoy nothing more than reading a book about books. I’m familiar with Tim Parks through his novels, many of which I’ve…
The Road to Middlemarch: My Life with George Eliot by Rebecca Mead
Reviewed by Lory Widmer Hess No two readers can really read the same book. The nuances generated by our particular set of experiences, associations, and interests color our reading, making…
Not My Father’s Son by Alan Cumming
Written by Victoria Best My abiding memory of Alan Cumming is from the Bond movie, Goldeneye, in which he plays his character of Machiavellian computer programmer like a cheeky and irritating…
Merchant Adventurers by James Evans
Reviewed by Liz Dexter In the mid-1500s, three ships set off from London to seek a passage to the famed untold riches of the Far East through a northern passage…
Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward
Reviewed by Rebecca Hussey Jesmyn Ward’s memoir Men We Reaped is a difficult book, but a necessary and compelling one. As Ward says in the book’s prologue, “telling this story is the hardest…
The Poet’s Tale: Chaucer and the Year that Made the Canterbury Tales by Paul Strohm
Written by Victoria So what’s a medieval historian to do with a figure like Chaucer? A man who still exerts a fascination over his audience down through the centuries, and…
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
Reviewed by Simon There are plenty of copies of Virginia Woolf’s famous feminist essay A Room of One’s Own available, new and second hand, but I couldn’t resist reviewing it now that…