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...
A curator of fashion at the V&A for most of her working life, CW uses her experience and sensitivity to clothes to explore how, in her own family's life, the secrets of clothes measure out t... read more
The author's mother came from a Sikh family that fled the Punjab in Partition; later she moved to Berlin and Washington. A fine memoir of family whose identity and roots have been complicate... read more
First of a beautifully published pair of LL's famous memoirs: in this we have his lyrical evocation of a childhood in rural England during the years after WW1. Lovely clothbound edition from... read more
MS is an outstanding literary voice in contemporary Russia: here she creates a portrait of three Russian-Jewish generations sifted from the detritus in a late aunt's flat. This book is diff... read more
The second volume of a beautifully published pair of LL's famous memoirs, in which the young man leaves his beloved village of Slad for London and then walks and busks his way around Spain.... read more
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.
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
In this inspired recreation of her parents' hopes and lives, MW has created a vivid memoir of post-war childhood and adventure in Cairo, Italy and London.
A memoir by the cultural historian and Maltravers Herald Extraordinary, redhead and exultant non-driver, whose arms include three stags trippant. His book on James Wyatt is still the best; ... read more
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
He has been making documentaries in Westminster for fifty years, and filmed the last ten Prime Ministers. Here he shares insights and some of the confidences given to him by his subjects whe... read more
A hotchpotch of journal entries from the last seven years to do with living around Paris, surprisingly free of the angst found in much of her other writing.
A spare and engaging chronicle of the summers spent in a small cabin on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland with her partner, who did the illustrations.
Wry and robust memoir from the Conservative MP of - amongst other things - 'Plebgate' notoriety. Praised by voices on both sides of the political divide.
When the author's mother dies, leaving a strangely symbolic collection of everyday objects behind her, Wicha begins to sort through the belongings and constructs a minute, material history b... read more
A memoir by the Egytian woman who set up an independent book shop with a friend and her sister in 2002 - ten years later it had grown to include ten shops and 150 employees. Full of the nois... read more
A memoir of life as a small girl in Rabindranath Tagore's famous cultural community in the 1930s, by one of India's foremost literary figures. Translated from the Bengali. (Originally due fo... 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?
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
The spark for this remarkable memoir was a scribbled list of paintings that belonged to the Parisian author's great-grandparents - Degas, Renoir, Monet, Tiepolo etc - of which she knew nothi... read more
Marzahn is a suburb of prefab GDR housing on the outskirts of Berlin. This odd but brilliant book, about a chiropodist who talks to her clients, is both memoir and portrait of modern Germany... read more
Often hilarious and certainly astonishing, this is the novelist's memoir of growing up in Sheffield in the 1950s. His father, an insecure bully, adopted a toup?e, which functioned as an inst... read more
A strange and magical memoir of growing up in prosaic England with Anglo-Burmese parentage. Teak trees interweave oaks; myth and imagery chase each other through the author's odyssey through... read more
A selection of Jarman's writings on Prospect Cottage and the plants in its strange and consoling garden. His light, iridescent prose gives the strangest sense to the reader of being able to ... read more
He left his young family in the '60s for sex, drugs, and enlightenment with the cult of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh; he would reappear from time to time, bringing chaos in his wake.
Forster is always undoing, and no less so in this account of the remote princely court of Dewas in Madhya Pradesh, where he visited and worked as private secretary to the Maharajah in the ea... read more