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
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
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
From the back yard of a rough childhood to the fine gardens he has created professionally, Hamer shares the restorative consolations of the natural world and horticulture.
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.
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 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
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
In 2011 Taseer was kidnapped in Lahore by Taliban-affiliated gunmen; only a few months earlier his father, the governer of the province Punjab, had been murdered. It is thought that Taseer w... read more
An entertaining and affecting memoir of the great pianist's youth and early training, which began in a suburb of post-war Liverpool. Told with candour and simplicity.
The Chinese-born novelist moved to Britain and then to the US. Her memoir glints with her fascination with the West as well as her nostalgia for the East.
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
A memoir by this most communicative classicist about her own experiences of suicide, and how she found consolation and understanding of herself and her family through close readings of clas... read more
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 love hotel on Japan's Inland Sea, H.G. Wells, Rebecca West, 1930s' physics: a mesmerising memoir of his parents by the author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
Brought up in North Carolina in the Jim Crow era, AT won a postgraduate scholarship to Brown University, worked at Warhol's Factory and volunteered for Diana Vreeland. He went on to become e... 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