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
A comic masterpiece of a memoir: the subject, chiefly, is the Irish filmmaker Brian Desmond Hurst, who once described himself as tri-sexual - "the Army, the Navy and the Household Cavalry"..... read more
Born into a farming family in the eastern Tibetan province of Kham, the author fled with his older brother following the Chinese invasion in 1959. He has spent many years in the UK and the U... 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
Born in Kenya, the author was two when the Mau Mau uprising began. A powerful memoir of this very difficult period and the end of empire in Kenya.The author worked for many years for the BBC... read more
A wry memoir of his recovery from a stroke in 2011, during which time his thoughts turned to his father too. Completed shortly before his death earlier this year.
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
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
A re-issue of this delightful short memoir by the son of Lee Miller and Roland Penrose who did indeed take a bite out of Pablo - who, unlike Mr Murdstone in David Copperfield, bit the boy s... read more
A witness to the Beslan massacre, the former Moscow correspondent sought to ease his soul and deepen his understanding of the roots of violence by taking a 1000-mile walk along the political... 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
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