Book review – autobiography
A cacophony of complaint
What sort of monster gives a bad review to a book by someone who was gang raped as a 12-year-old…
A sex vampire on wheels
The title of this book tells you a lot. Jack Sutherland, who grew up in London and Los Angeles, worked…
Patti Smith grows old too gracefully
‘Jesus died for somebody’s sins/ but not mine’: the opening lines of Patti Smith’s 1975 debut album, Horses, find a…
Wholly German art
Philip Hensher admires an old-fashioned conductor who unashamedly favours the great German composers — and Wagner in particular
Into the blue
Jenny Balfour Paul is an indigo dye expert. She has written two books on the subject, and lectures around the…
A safe pair of hands
Among the more intriguing insights into an election that seems to be taking longer than a Cliff Thorburn 50 break…
Trailing clouds of glory
With Alpine wreckage still being sifted, this is either a very good or a very bad time to write about…
That unmistakable touch of Glass
Philip Hensher infinitely prefers the words to the music of the maverick ‘minimalist’ composer
Promising more than he delivers
In 2001, Tony Blair took Sir Michael Barber from his perch as special adviser in the Department for Education and…
Majesty of the malls
In this autobiography, Mary Portas doesn’t dip into the fabled store of her talents by giving an account of her…
A perfect nightmare
Dylan Evans, the author of this book, was one of those oddballs who rather looked forward to the apocalypse, because…
Crime and cover-up — a very Russian tale
The way to think about Russia, Bill Browder told me in Moscow in 2004, using a comparison he recycles in…
Beautiful dreamer
Despite it being a well known fact that Antonia Fraser had earthly parents, I had always imagined that she had…
The driving force of an ageing rocker
Why do people talk about ‘experimenting’ with drugs when mostly they just mean that they’re doing them? Perhaps, as I…
Unhappy in their own way
Misery loves company. Anyone who doubts this old adage should pop into their local bookshop, because besides celebrity chefs and…
Say Cheese
Like many of my generation I was enchanted by the surrealistic irreverence of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, until I overheard…
She knows she is right
Shami Chakrabarti, director of the civil rights group Liberty and omnipresent media personality, is on the cover of her book.…
The greatest living Yorkshireman
After 13 barren years Yorkshire is back at the top of county cricket, where Geoffrey Boycott believes it has a…
Perils of a charmed life
In these diaries, which I found excellent in a very specific way, Michael Palin tells us about his life between…
I believe in yesterday
Alan Johnson’s first volume of memoirs, This Boy, is still in the bestsellers’ list, but the Stakhanovite postman has made…
Looking on the bright side
If Vincent Poklewski Koziell has really drunk as much as he claims in this book I doubt he would be…
Life was a ball
This is the Real Thing, an evocative account of English upper-class life throughout the 20th century. It begins amidst the…
Talking tough
Last year a Washington-based journalist called Mark Leibovich wrote This Town, a book whose thesis was, roughly, that Washington-based journalists…
A beautiful mind too
The title of this reflective and readable memoir refers to the author’s lifetime interests in sport and medicine — tracks…
Who knows wins
Anyone brought up as I was in a Daily Express household in the 1950s — there were approaching 11 million…
