Autobiography
Country Boy, by Richard Hillyer - review
Under his real name, Charles James Stranks, the author of this little masterpiece wrote on a number of ecclesiastical subjects:…
The World is Ever Changing, by Nicolas Roeg - a review
‘Value and worth in any of the arts has always been about timing,’ writes British director Nicolas Roeg at the…
Backing Into the Light, by Colin Spencer - review
Colin Spencer first came to my notice in the Swinging Sixties when a fellow undergraduate alerted me to his larky…
Strictly Ann, by Ann Widdecombe - review
An oddball. And proud to be one. Ann Widdecombe has sailed through life with the same brisk, no-nonsense style that…
Folly de Grandeur, by Nicky Haslam- review
Nicky Haslam is one of our best interior designers, a charmed and charming agent of style, a tastemaker for the…
Bookends: Spirit of place
A new book by Ronald Blythe is something of an event. In recent years the bard of Akenfield has mostly…
Low life and high style
The return of Roy Kerridge
A well-told lie
Michael Ondaatje takes a journey into childhood
Pig in the middle
Writing an autobiographical account of middle age is a brave undertaking, necessitating a great deal of self-scrutiny at a time of life when most of us would sooner look the other way and hope for the best.
Red badge of courage
The author describes this book as an ‘auto- biographical novel’, but since it would be quite beyond me to distinguish fact from fiction in this hair-raising account of his childhood years, I propose to treat it as if it were all true, especially as I can’t imagine anyone making any of it up.
Cambridge and after
My dread was that someone would ask me my opinion of Lermontov or Superstring Theory or the Categorical Imperatives of Kant.
A charismatic narcissist
In equal measure, this book is fascinating and irritating.
A foot in both camps
As a five-year-old in the Arab quarter of Jerusalem in the 1950s, Kai Bird overheard an elderly American heiress offering $1 million to anyone who could solve the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The dying of the light
The phrasing of the subtitle is exact: a memoir in blindness, not of blind- ness.
Crisp and brave
Among my guests last weekend as I read Lord Mandelson’s book was Ben, aged two and a half.
How are you today?
How am I? Very well, thank you.
Mountain sheep aren’t sweeter
Anyone who can speak Welsh is going to get a lot of fun from this book.
Insufficiently honoured here
‘Next time it’s full buggery!’ said Christopher Hitchens as I helped him onto a train at Taunton station after a full luncheon of Black Label, Romanée-Conti, eel risotto and suckling pig.
Casualties of war and peace
John Simpson quotes Humbert Wolfe’s mischievous lampoon but makes it clear that, in spite of the somewhat disobliging title of his book, he does not accept it as fair comment.
The ghost of an egoist
Very long books appear at intervals about Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
Survivor syndrome
In late middle age, William Styron was struck by a disabling illness, when everything seemed colourless, futile and empty to him.
Chic lit
First, I must declare an interest.
Fun and games
Sport, say those who write about it, is only the toy department of daily journalism.
Mum, dad and the music
Bob Geldof is quoted on the cover of Gary Kemp’s autobiography with untypical succinctness: ‘Great bloke, great band, great book’.
But then the snow turned to rain
My daughter when small came home from school one night singing these extraordinary lines: ‘Fortune, my foe, why dost thou frown on me/ And will thy favours never lighter be?’
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