Over the Ocean by Erica Fischer
Translated by Andrew Brown Reviewed by Jean Morris The media were full of the D-Day commemorations as I read this book – stories of wartime fear and bravery that I’d…
The Path Through The Trees by Christopher Milne
Reviewed by Claire When you are the inspiration for one of the most famous and best-loved children’s books of all time, how do you grow up? How do you set…
One Summer: America 1927 by Bill Bryson
Reviewed by Harriet Devine If I were to make a list of things I probably wouldn’t want to read a book about, aeroplanes, cars, baseball and finance would be somewhere near…
Pleasures and Landscapes by Sybille Bedford
Reviewed by Simon Thomas Are you ready to be transported back to postwar Europe? Although this collection of essays was first published as Pleasures and Landscapes as recently as 2003, they are…
My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff
Reviewed by Victoria Best When this memoir begins, Joanna Rakoff is 23 and has just dropped out of her graduate literary program in London and returned to New York, declaring…
My Crazy Century: A Memoir by Ivan Klima
Reviewed by Max Dunbar Dictatorship of the Average This place’ll be a paradise tomorrow. And in every department there’ll be a supervisor with a sub-machine gun. – from ‘Mao Tse…
The Trip to Echo Spring by Olivia Laing
By Max Dunbar A decade or so into his career as a bestselling novelist, horror writer Stephen King ran into problems. He was drinking constantly and taking cocaine, banging out…
Music Night at the Apollo: A Memoir of Drifting by Lilian Pizzichini
Reviewed by Denise Kong In 2007 Lilian Pizzichini “had it all”. She’d worked at The Times Literary Supplement and The Literary Review, won the Crime Writers’ Association Golden Dagger for non-fiction with her first…
Domestic Manners of the Americans by Frances Trollope
Reviewed by Harriet Devine No author of the present day has been at once so much read, so much admired and so much abused. So wrote the New Monthly Review…
Hotel Florida: Truth, Love and Death in the Spanish Civil War by Amanda Vaill
Reviewed by Harriet Devine The Spanish Civil War (1936-39), a messy, bloody conflict in which Spanish Republicans fought to save their country from the forces of Fascism, foreshadowed the Second…
A.A. Milne: His Life by Ann Thwaite
Review by Simon Thomas What do you know about A. A. Milne? Your answer might be a little different if you’ve read our Five Fascinating Facts – or, indeed, if you’ve followed…
The Valley by Richard Benson
Reviewed by Victoria Best The best kind of non-fiction, I think, shows us how supposedly ‘average’ ordinary lives are really quite extraordinary. In the author’s foreward to his outstanding book…
An Encyclopaedia of Myself by Jonathan Meades
Reviewed by Eric Karl Anderson For several decades, Jonathan Meades has been a well-established writer, cultural critic of primarily food & architecture and broadcaster in Britain. He has such a…
Women of the World by Helen McCarthy
Reviewed by Victoria Best When I was sitting my A levels back in 1987, my school thought itself very advanced because it gave us all a careers questionnaire to fill…
A Curious Career by Lynn Barber
Reviewed by Annabel Gaskell Some readers will have seen the rather excellent film An Education, based upon an episode in veteran journalist Lynn Barber’s life as a teenager where she fell…
Charlotte Mew and Her Friends by Penelope Fitzgerald
Reviewed by Simon Thomas I’m going to be honest, when I picked up a biography a little-known turn-of-the-century poet, I wasn’t expecting it to be a page turner. I’d never read…
The Unexpected Professor by John Carey
Reviewed by Rob Spence John Carey has had a long and distinguished career in academia, and this autobiography records his journey from childhood in the war to his current position…
Field of Shadows by Dan Waddell
Reviewed by Terence Jagger When I first heard of an English cricket tour to Germany in 1937, I assumed it was essentially subversive – that the tour would have been…
Computing with Quantum Cats by John Gribbin
Reviewed by Peter Hobson The name John Gribbin will be familiar to many readers with an interest in understanding the mysterious quantum world as he is well known for books…
An Island Odyssey by Hamish Haswell-Smith
Reviewed by Lizzy Siddal It is a piece of weakness and folly merely to value things because of the distance from the place where we are born: thus men have…
Vita Sackville-West’s Sissinghurst by Vita Sackville-West & Sarah Raven
Reviewed by Rachel Fenn Sissinghurst is the sort of place that you can’t help but fall in love with at first sight, even if you have absolutely no interest in…
Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words by Boel Westin
Translated by Silvester Mazzarella Reviewed by Simon Thomas Tove Jansson is one of my very favourite authors, and I often recommend her to friends and fellow bibliophiles. Each time, except…
The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz
Reviewed by Victoria Best Best book of the year so far is Stephen Grosz’s compilation of case stories from his thirty years as a psychotherapist, The Examined Life; How We Lose…
On Writing by A.L. Kennedy
Reviewed by Simon Thomas When I first heard that A.L. Kennedy had written a book called On Writing – now out in paperback – I was intrigued and very keen to read…