Memoir

Gay bar, how I miss you. Barely any lesbian joints have survived the online dating scene, and Grindr has replaced the cruising bars. Why get dressed up and brave the buses when all you have to do to get a date is access an app? I was keen to indulge in some nostalgia when I picked up Jeremy Atherton Lin’s Gay Bar: Why We Went Out. I would now prefer dinner with friends to seedy nightclubs reeking of sex and poppers, but as a youngster I loved a gay disco. Taking us through a personal, historical and political view of the gay bars of London, San Francisco and Los Angeles,

Suffering from post-traumatic stress and the effects of government austerity measures, Paul Jones resigned as the head of an inner-city secondary school and, ‘an idiot without a job’, decided to cycle from Land’s End to John o’Groats in four stages spread over ten months. He had raced occasionally with professional cyclists but had never ridden more than 127 miles in a day. His aim was to ‘dissect a brain slice of the country’, to find some relief from the ‘formless terror’ of his mental landscape, and to subject himself to the torture of a long-haul literary endeavour. It took him three years to produce this companionable and energetic book about

Hella Pick is one of that vanishing generation of Jewish refugees who arrived in Britain on the eve of the second world war, courtesy of the Kindertransport. An only child of separated parents, born and brought up in Vienna, she was luckier than most: her mother got out soon afterwards. Her grandmother, who remained, died in Theresienstadt. Early life in the UK was not easy for refugees from Nazism. Visas were only granted to those who had an offer of work, and just about the only work permitted to them was domestic service, which must have been particularly galling for people like Hella’s mother who had once been prosperous. Young

Okinawa is having a moment. Recently a Telegraph travel destination, to many in the west it’s still unfamiliar except as a location of the Pacific theatre. To Elizabeth Miki Brina, the author of Speak, Okinawa, it was also unfamiliar until she was 34 — though her own mother is Okinawan, and she had spent time there as a child. Not until the break up of a relationship which played out the toxicities of her own family relations did she attempt to unravel her mother’s heritage: Okinawa’s brutal history, not Japanese, yet owned by, and at the mercy, of Japan; its persecution by America; its current state of suffering and her

In a career stretching back to the mid-1980s, Robert Edric has so far managed a grand total of 28 novels, plus a couple of early efforts under his birth name, G.E. Armitage. I must have read two thirds of this shelf-distending oeuvre, but in none of them have I ever detected the faintest whiff of disguised autobiography. Whether writing about early-Victorian Lakeland, in the 2006 Booker-longlisted Casting the Waters, or reanimating the career of P.T. Barnum (In the Days of the American Museum, 1990), Edric has always worn his detachment, his absolute reluctance to say anything about the person he is, or was, like a rosette. All this makes My

A while ago, Samantha Markle declared that her forthcoming book would be about ‘the beautiful nuances of our lives’. Was it a misprint for beautiful nuisances? Or did she have a change of heart? Either way, there isn’t a beautiful nuance in sight. Instead, it is like a blunt object found at the scene of a crime. As royal memoirs go, it is by far the most macabre, and perhaps even loopier than the Duchess of York’s Finding Sarah: A Duchess’s Journey to Find Herself. By the third page Samantha already has her knives out. The first person to get it in the back is her mother, a forgotten figure

Until this book was published, Gabriel Matzneff was a respectable man. The French author may have written about his affairs with young girls and his travels to the Philippines in search of pre-pubescent boys — insert Gallic shrug here — but he still won literary prizes and enjoyed a state stipend. He was celebrated by the chattering classes, who said little when he brought different adolescent girls as his plus one to interviews. Little V, or V sometimes, was one of those girls. She had slipped in and out of his autofiction for decades. In Consent, her memoir, Vanessa Springora returns the favour and refers to him by his initial.

When police were called to a block of flats in north London at the beginning of 2002, they expected to find a routine dispute between neighbours. What they actually discovered was the body of a woman, Rose White, in the locked bedroom of one of the apartments. The officers suspected foul play and the tenant, Anthony Hardy, was charged with murder. Incredibly, an incompetent pathologist concluded that the 38-year-old victim had died of a heart attack. (The pathologist was later struck off.) The murder charge was dropped; Hardy pleaded guilty to criminal damage and was sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Released before the end of the year, he went

What happens to a child raised without love? This is the agonising question that the American lawyer Justine Cowan braces herself to address in a memoir that seeks to explain her relationship with Eileen, her monster of a mother. As her parent’s gaunt figure lay in hospital, vanishing within the fog of a disease that had robbed her of ‘a few words here, a memory there’, Justine forced herself to say the words that she thought her mother wanted to hear. However, long devoid of empathy for someone whose behaviour had baffled, undermined and almost destroyed her, Justine knew a false expression of love was ‘balm for a dying old

In the summer of 2012, a man was walking near Jabal Shashabo, a Syrian rebel enclave, when he spotted a group of turquoise canisters with what appeared to be tail fins attached. He picked up one of the objects and filmed it. Later he uploaded his video to YouTube. What were those strange turquoise cans? The answer was provided not by a UN investigator, war correspondent or military expert, but by a bored business administrator at his desk in Leicester. He had never been to Syria, spoke no Arabic and by his own admission knew nothing about weaponry. But Eliot Higgins had become fascinated by the war in Syria, and

Although I can understand why Dana Gillespie might choose to call her memoir after her most famous album, for the first 170 pages I remained convinced she should have taken a leaf from John Cleland and called it Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. For hers has been an extraordinary life (or perhaps half life, as the trail of hi-jinks runs its course by the end of the 1970s). And so, despite reading at times like a cross between Terry Southern’s Candy and Confessions of a Window Cleaner’s screenplay — but with A-listers the ones shaking their sticks — as an evocation of the 1960s SW7-style, Weren’t Born a Man

If this book becomes a Netflix blockbuster, as it surely must, Barbara Amiel presents us with an opening image. She describes, during a visit to see her husband Conrad Black in prison, watching a Monarch butterfly rise above roadside debris: You couldn’t miss it in that bright early morning sunscape of trash cans and crumpled paper cups, so intense the colours and so large its wings as it did a parabola over a little triangular patch of wildflowers growing off to the side of the service area at Turkey State on Interstate 95. Let me have a think about whom that might metaphorically represent. We find out later: This book

‘It was a gray mass of people in rags, lying motionless with bloodless, pale faces, cropped hair, with a shifty, gloomy look.’ Julius Margolin’s first encounter with Soviet prisoners takes place in August 1940 on the way to a labour camp in the north of Russia. Four years later, waiting at another transit point, he sees ‘semi-cripples, former, present and future invalids’, ‘bony shadows with hands and feet like sticks, in smelly tatters and dirty rags’. He has another year of horror ahead. A Polish Jew stranded in the USSR at the beginning of the second world war, Margolin refused to take Soviet citizenship and as a result was sentenced

The problem with telling stories about Harvard is that Harvard, if it teaches anything these days, teaches distrust of stories. So, for example, two thirds of the way through Becky Cooper’s long, ambitious book about the murder of a Harvard graduate student, the author explains that ‘we’ — those attempting to fashion a narrative about the gruesome fate of a 23-year-old woman bludgeoned to death in her Cambridge apartment in the late 1960s — ‘had unconsciously been perpetuating a story whose moral derived from the very patriarchal system we thought we were surmounting by telling the story in the first place’. This is a book that twists itself into a

The region of Dolpo in Nepal forms part of a border zone between that country and China in the central Himalayas. It is essentially a high-altitude desert encircled by towering snow-capped peaks and has long been celebrated in the West as a real-life version of Shangri-La. Part of the image flows from the restricted access permitted to outsiders, and also from the lives of its inhabitants, who might belong politically to Nepal but culturally show allegiance to the former theocracy presided over by the Dalai Lama. Dolpo is one of the last places on Earth where a vestige of the traditional Buddhist society of Tibet still survives. Another key part