Book review – memoir

In the face of unendurable pain that must be endured and unimaginable loss that must be imagined, jokes should not be resisted or turned away. Miriam Toews, describing the day that her father ended his life, remembers him assessing the outfit – torn jeans and a green hoodie – that she had been wearing for a fortnight. ‘Did you have much trouble deciding what to wear?’ he asked as he left his ham sandwich uneaten at a family lunch. Afterwards, he made his way to the railway tracks. A dozen years later, Miriam’s older sister Marjorie died by suicide in the same manner the day before her 52nd birthday. Toews

Not far into The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman, Didier Eribon quotes from this balladesque 1980 track by the French singer-songwriter Jean Ferrat: We have to be reasonable You can’t go on living like this Alone if you fell sick We would be so worried You’ll see, you’ll be happy there We’ll sort through your affairs Find the photos you love It’s strange that a whole life Can be held in one hand With the other residents You’ll find lots to talk about There’s a TV in your room A pretty garden downstairs With roses that bloom In December as in June You’ll see, you’ll be

It is, perhaps, hard to imagine a collaboration between Virgil and Captain W.E. Johns, a fusion of the Aeneid and Biggles Pulls It Off, but that is how Boris Johnson’s memoir reads. Our intrepid hero travels round the world, wooing Gulf potentates, sticking it to Vladimir Putin, snatching submarine contracts from under Emmanuel Macron’s snooty Gallic nose and then makes it home in time for some uniting and levelling up before settling down to a well-deserved glass of Tignanello. He also, like Aeneas, endures a thousand ordeals and makes himself father of the world’s greatest city (while also making some truly dreadful puns: ‘Was it H.J. Eysenck who gave me

When you think that David Niven, James Mason, Ronnie Barker, Arthur Lowe and Powell and Pressburger among many others failed to receive state honours, you’ll concede that a knighthood was wasted on Patrick Stewart, even if for 12 years he was chancellor of Huddersfield University. I mean no disparagement by this. I’m happy for him. But why not Sir Timothy Spall or Sir Timothy West? Stewart, whose grandmother was Stan Laurel’s babysitter, is a middle-ranking mime with a gurgling bass-baritone. He is chiefly famous for the X-Men franchise and for playing Captain Jean-Luc Picard in 178 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, plus the numerous feature film spin-offs in

I am working on a play about Marilyn Monroe at the moment and, reading Britney Spears’s book, the similarities of these two fragile blondes came to mind. Both were celebrated and castigated for their woman-child sex appeal; both struggled with sinister Svengalis – Darryl Zanuck and Mickey Mouse. But one big difference between the two is that Marilyn often wished she had a father, while one imagines Britney often wishes she hadn’t. In the long and sorry history of parasitical men leeching off talented women, was there ever a more worthless example than Jamie Spears? He used his daughter as a cash-cow from her childhood; when she became an adult

The reason conspiracy theories are so resilient, reproducing themselves from one generation to another, is that they are unfalsifiable. Evidence against them, however solid, has obviously been faked. Anyone who tries to demonstrate that Americans did land on the moon or that J.F. Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald is obviously in the pay of people who stand to benefit. If you ask who those people are, since there seems to be no evidence of their existence, the answer is always the same: they are very good at concealing themselves. And so the theory finds credulous punters. To save time, I should probably point out that The Spectator, which

It’s a familiar tale. Midway through life’s journey, Marcus Berkmann woke to find himself in a dark wood, where the right road was wholly lost and gone. Without a Virgil to guide him through the trials and torments of middle age, he composed a bestselling memoir based on his experiences, A Shed of One’s Own – not so much a divine comedy as a mildly amusing stocking-filler. In his latest book, Still a Bit of Snap in the Celery, he realises he has entered a new age category: the so-called ‘young-old’. It’s easy to picture the delight on the sleepy faces of many a grandparent this Christmas as they wake