A week into Israel’s bombing of Gaza in 2023, which followed Hamas’s deadly terrorist attack on Israel, Scotland’s then first minister Humza Yousaf received a text from his mother-in-law, Elizabeth. “Humza, I... Read more »
Television is an intimate art form, once beamed into living rooms, now on devices right in front of our faces. The screenwriter Russell T Davies understands that intimacy. Whether discussing his early days developing lost-to-history... Read more »
Charles Spencer’s Swan Song, a memoir of his relationship with his sister, the late Diana, Princess of Wales, is a fascinating document that tells us a little about Diana and a great... Read more »
When Emmanuel Carrère’s mother, Hélène, died in 2023, at the age of 94, President Macron spoke at her memorial. She had been “perpetual secretary” of the Académie Française, in effect its head, and... Read more »
In this moving, sometimes grandiloquent grief-memoir-cum-travelogue, Rory MacLean pairs an affinity for new-age thinking with a habit of loftily holding forth (“none of us are created for naught”, “love can but lead... Read more »
As an eight-year-old in comfortable, solid, suburban California, Michael Cunningham felt compelled to make art before he quite understood what it was, or could do: a painting of souls ascending to heaven,... Read more »
A little-known autobiography from Lindsey Graham published in 2015 sheds light on his complicated record of acknowledging and addressing racism in South Carolina. Graham, born in 1955, came of age in a... Read more »
When Laverne Cox was eight years old and growing up in Mobile, Alabama, she saved up her pocket money and bought herself a fan decorated with Japanese geishas. The fan became her... Read more »
Every aspect of a family’s life will seem normal to the small children within it; only hindsight can bring what was abnormal into relief. Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s earliest years were spent on the run... Read more »