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
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
He was a resistance fighter in WW2 Budapest, a travel photographer in South America and an abusive patriarch in 70s New York - but Steven Faludi disappeared from his daughter's life decades ... 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
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
Wry and robust memoir from the Conservative MP of - amongst other things - 'Plebgate' notoriety. Praised by voices on both sides of the political divide.
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.
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
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
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?
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 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 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.
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.
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
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
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
From the library of Marguerite Littman.
Skelton’s first volume of memoirs covers her youth, war years in Cairo and Athens and marriage to Cyril Connolly; full of gossip and insights int... read more
A collection of essays on the student revolutions of 1968, from the Sorbonne to Berlin, Czechoslovakia Columbia University and the LSE. Spender’s poems are still in print but most of his o... read more
Born in 1914 in Czernovitz in what is now Ukraine, the author was successively a citizen of Austro-Hungary, Romania and the Soviet Union as the bloody tides of the C20th swept to and fro bef... 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
A memoir of the artist and of the author's friendship with him, part biography, part art criticism. Their friendship and this book cover the latter part of Guston's life, when his late work ... read more
Turkel was born in a Chinese 're-education' camp, and finally got to the US where he trained as a lawyer, specialising in Uyghur activism. This is his account of China's horrendous oppressio... read more