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 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 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.
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
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
A memoir structured round mementos that takes us to Ossie & Celia, Andy, Karl, Diana, Freddie, Diana, Diana, Barbra and many other luminaries, or possibly icons.
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
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
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
This intensely lyrical and radical 'memoir' of the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland was written in the last years of WW2, but only published in 1977. The long-overlooked Modernist novelist an... read more
This intensely lyrical and radical 'memoir' of the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland was written in the last years of WW2, but only published in 1977. The long-overlooked Modernist novelist an... read more
The author fled Iraq with his family to Israel in 1950: this personal narrative of emigration also contends with the repercussions of Zionism for an Arab-Jew.
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
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
Stevenson was once the youngest trader in the city and Citibank's most profitable, dealing in nearly a trillion dollars a day. Then he gave it up. A remarkable memoir - funny, excoriating an... read more
Stewart's decade in Westminster. This will undoubtedly be the political memoir of the year: rational, intelligent, candid, passionate, angry, open-eyed, honourable.
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.
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
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