An exceptional memoir of growing up in northern Germany in the 1930s and of the slide into war. The historian and novelist is warm and humorous as well as observant and meticulous. An unnerv... read more
Her life in disarray, La Stibbe returns to London for a sabbatical and lodges with Deborah Moggach. As ever she's funny, but there is pathos and pain here too.
Xi Jinping is head of the CCP, head of state and commander-in-chief of the military, with an indefinite period in office; he's centralised power, increased state control of the economy and i... read more
The memoirs of Henry 'Bunter' Somerset - rock singer and songwriter, formerly the Marquess of Worcester, now the 17th Duke of Beaufort and the owner of Badminton House.
Though Royal Gardener to both Georges I and II and designer of gardens at Kensington Palace, Houghton and many other illustrious estates, Bridgeman's geometric taste and works were mostly ob... read more
The author went to Venice in 1957, aged 25, to have fun for a season among the rich and glam. Written with 67 years' hindsight, this memoir is a vivid evocation of a vanished era.
The 40-year relationship between the prodigious writer and scholar (biographer of Gandhi, amongst other things, and a JS customer) and his original editor at Oxford University Press.
The C10th synthesis of Greek thought in Central Asi. Starr's magnificent book is a cultural and intellectual history of the Islamic Enlightenment and its two chief proponents - Ibn Sina and ... read more
From the emergence of tyranny to the malaise of ennui, LS surveys how Hannah Arendt's life and work can help us confront the perils of contemporary post-truth politics.
A rich study of the gulf between Hardy's fictional women, with whom he seems to have empathised, and the real women around him... who needed a certain hardiness (?) in their troubled relatio... read more
The embodiment of mens sana in corpore sano rowed across the Channel, swam the Niagara basin twice and became an MP. He and his wife were intimate with the 'Souls'.
The post-war eclipse of the rural by the urban. Joyce interweaves his own Irish family history into wider story of European peasantry to create a rich and varied cultural account of what it ... read more
He ruled an area of the Indian subcontinent greater than anyone until the British 2000 years later; famously he renounced war for Buddhism and promoted religious toleration throughout his mu... read more
How the daughter of Babur, first Mughal Emperor, wrangled her way out of the harem (for a while) to travel around India, to Persia and beyond. Based on her own account.
This fascinating account of a forgotten moment in history is part family memoir, part the telling of a Texan offshoot of the early Zionist movement, when 10,000 Jews set sail for Galveston b... read more
Dorothy Dean was one of the few African American women of the New York 60s underground scene. She starred in six of Andy Warhol's films. Patti Smith calls her 'small, black and brilliant,' i... read more
Stevenson was once the youngest trader in the city and Citibank's most profitable, dealing in nearly a trillion dollars a day. Then he gave it up. A remarkable memoir - funny, excoriating an... read more
CC withdrew to an enclosed world in her mid-20s, to emerge a decade later. This memoir of her private struggles and of tension within the institution is both moving and unexpectedly gripping... read more
A many-layered memoir from the Pulitzer-winning author of The Sympathizer: the American dream, the Vietnam War, the life of the refugee, adoption, violence, identity.
The role of surrealism and the cultural milieu of Paris in the 1940s helped inspire Boulez's emotional and radical music. CP's last book - on Eric Satie - was excellent.
Anne Clifford's diaries, Mary Sidney's translations, Aemilia Lanyer's poems, Elizabeth Cary's playwriting: out of these a fine scholar of Renaissance literature constructs an illuminating gr... read more
Nearly 600 letters from the pre-Raphaelite model who became the wife of William Morris and the lover of Dante Gabriel Rosetti. An impeccably researched, annotated and edited work, this first... read more
Like a detective novel of the time, the story of two booksellers who uncovered the forgeries of a pompous bastion of the literary scene in 1930s' London.
The great novelist returns to poetry - where his career began - to consider migration, borders and displacement, from his childhood in Sri Lanka to Canadian rivers and Bulgarian Orthodox chu... read more