My theory and practice is to say yes to life and then I'll see how I manage along the way. Part memoir, part manifesto of a fiercely independent spirit; intelligent and lyrical.
BA, aka Lady Black, has led "more colourful lives than the most exotic Cheshire Cat", quoth Sir Elton John. Trailed as a candid account of a fairly kaleidoscopic existence, from not-quite-ra... read more
Witty, tangential, self-deprecating, Amis's autobiography is not a chronological procession of memories but a frenzy of footnotes, asides, literary zigzags through time and space. It's funny... read more
Reading this 'novel' is like going to stay with an old uncle, one with lots of stories to tell but nobody to tell them to. Little Keith - as Hitchens used to call Amis - has been waiting for... read more
Slim but far-reaching memoir of the author's brush with suicide, framed as the consequence of familial trauma and isolation. Superbly written, this bears honourable comparison with William S... read more
A re-issue of this charming, episodic memoir of the great illustrator's early life, filled with his sketches; he himself called it "an autobiographical fragment". Published here in a pocket... read more
The extraordinary woman who wandered the world gathering herbal lore settled in a cabin in the New Forest for three years in the 1950s, where she raised her children.
From a trunk of diaries and letters, the author constructs the lively story of her mother, Celia Paget, and her sister. Lovers and friends included Orwell, Koestler, Camus, Sartre and de Bea... read more
A slim but energetic reminiscence about the gardens the Bannerpeople have made as a couple: they are now three years into making their fourth, at their Elizabethan manor house in Somerset. E... read more
The former Editor of the Financial Times (2005-2020) was scribbling away during the tech boom, the global financial crisis, the rise of China, Brexit, etc...
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.
The author's investigation of her family's history and her own identity was sparked by the arrival of an anonymous postcard bearing four names that arrived over forty years after those four ... read more
This montage weaves together memories from Bergman's childhood and adulthood with all their subtle parallels. Film-like, dream-like and beautifully crafted, this self-portrait is startlingly... read more
A riotous memoir of attempting to mount a Bacon exhibition in the last days of the USSR; apparatchiks, honey-traps, the KGB - has the author's liver ever recovered?
Recounts the author's quest for Adele Hugo, who followed the object of her (unrequited) love, a British soldier, to the Caribbean, and then returned to live out the rest of her days in a Fre... read more
A memoir about silence, from the mysterious things the adults didn't talk about during his childhood, to the vast silences of the Arctic that have occupied so much of his own adult life as w... read more
From London in the Swinging Sixties to a hippie retreat in the Outer Hebrides: she and her partner travelled - slowly - by horse and wagon. She gave up music, disillusioned with the pop indu... read more
CC is the distinguished Australian publisher who founded Virago. Her forebear was transported for seven years for stealing a piece of hemp, but managed to prosper in Australia. He returned t... read more
A beguiling work of auto-fiction - a juggling act that Carrère refined in Limonov, The Kingdom etc. He begins a ten-day retreat, lit by the sun of literary success, but desperate matters in... read more
"I have borne the musket of a soldier, the traveller's cane, and the pilgrim's staff: as a sailor my fate has been as inconstant as the wind: a kingfisher, I have made my nest among the wave... read more
"I have borne the musket of a soldier, the traveller's cane, and the pilgrim's staff: as a sailor my fate has been as inconstant as the wind: a kingfisher, I have made my nest among the wave... read more
Ruthlessly funny memoir of working front of house: the great deception of ease, of luxe, calme et volupte , of lamplight and conversation, while, behind the swing doors, rages a very differe... read more
All that remains of the Osnabruk synagogue is a small pile of stones and some chickenwire: a space of oblivion in the German city explored by Cixous, whose Jewish mother came from there.
In February 1938 Georg Klaar, a Jewish lad of seventeen, went to his first ball in Vienna, staying until the band's last waltz. A month later came the Anschluss. The ensuing years brought ch... read more
Those who read Clare's Something of His Art, about J S Bach, or The Light in the Dark: A Winter Journal (or others) will know that Clare is a writer of exquisite sensibility and nuance. He i... read more