Anne Chisholm 
Truth and beauty
Almost 20 years ago, Alice Munro, the Canadian genius of the short story, was interviewed by the Paris Review. She recalled a time when she was having trouble with her… Read more
The serpent in the garden
Loss of innocence happens to us all and is one of the great themes of literature. With The River, a novella first published in 1946 and now rightly republished by… Read more
What was it all for?
What happens to a novelist who becomes the conscience of a nation? Nadine Gordimer, who is now 89 and whose writing career began in the 1940s, has represented the progressive… Read more
Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford by Leslie Brody
Has the Mitford saga delighted us long enough? Some 17 non-fiction books about the family, mostly by its own members, have now been published; the first, in 1960, was Jessica… Read more
What did you do in the war, Mummy?
By tradition, ‘What did you do in the war?’ is a question children address to Daddy, not to Mummy. By tradition, ‘What did you do in the war?’ is a… Read more
A grief ago
The cautionary slogan ‘less is more’ has never been the American writer Joyce Carol Oates’ watchword. The cautionary slogan ‘less is more’ has never been the American writer Joyce Carol… Read more
Lessons for life
All modern biographies, one could say, are books of secrets; certainly all biographers during the past four decades have felt entitled to ferret around in their subject’s private as well… Read more
No love lost
There is chick lit, or witless, ill-written, juvenile popular fiction, and then there is superior chick lit, which is smart and amusing and written for grown ups. Both these novels… Read more
Her own best invention
Lesley Blanch, who died in 2007 aged almost 103, did not want this book written. Having spent her whole life spinning a web of romantic tales around herself, the last… Read more
An institution to love and cherish
Books about marriage, like the battered old institution itself, come in and out of fashion with writers, readers and politicians, but never quite die away. These two, from the latest… Read more
Jim’s especial foibles
As a young man in the 1970s Michael Bloch was the architectural historian and diarist James Lees- Milne’s last (if, we are assured, platonic) attachment, and later became his literary… Read more
Raising the last glass
My Father’s Tears, by John Updike Although an air of valediction inevitably hovers over this collection of short stories, the last of John Updike’s more than 60 books and published… Read more
The benefit of the doubt
With her brilliant new book, Hilary Mantel has not just written a rich, absorbingly readable historical novel; she has made a significant shift in the way any of her readers… Read more
The châtelaine and the wanderer
Towards the end of this hugely enjoyable volume of letters, selected and edited by the skilful Charlotte Mosley from half a century of correspondence (1954-2007), Deborah Devonshire, by now in… Read more
Growing old gracefully
Ninety may be the new 70, but it is also seriously old, and no picnic. In her short, sharp, disconcerting new book, Diana Athill, the renowned editor turned writer who… Read more
A very honourable rebel
In the autumn of 1995 Jessica Mitford, the youngest of the sisters, known to one and all since childhood as Decca, sat down at her desk in Oakland, California to… Read more
Fighting free of Father
When the second world war began, Nicholas Mosley, the distinguished novelist son of the fascist leader Sir Oswald, who thought that Britain should not fight Germany and whose second wife,… Read more
Rampant fascism near Henley
There can seldom have been a better first sentence in a book by a daughter about her mother: ‘“Heil Hitler!” shouted Mummy as she pushed Daddy down the stairs at… Read more
The dangerous edge of things
Listing page content here If her name rings a bell at all, Mary Wesley, who died aged 90 in 2002, is remembered for two things: publishing the first of ten… Read more
Counting fewer and fewer blessings
One of these anthologies (Late Youth) is small and sprightly, with a pretty, jaunty cover depicting one cheery old person cavorting on a pony and a second catching a fish.… Read more
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