When the title of Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir, Frankly, was first announced, I had my doubts. Partly, of course, it was a touching nod to her late friend, the comic Janey Godley. Godley’s... Read more »
AC Benson is remembered today, if at all, for having edited three volumes of Queen Victoria’s letters and for writing Land of Hope and Glory to accompany Elgar’s first Pomp and Circumstance... Read more »
In 2019, the TV presenter and journalist Fiona Phillips booked a last-minute trip to Vietnam with a friend. Nothing unusual there, you might think. But not only did Phillips not invite her... Read more »
The title of Al Pacino’s memoir comes from the nickname given to him by his mother when he was growing up. His parents divorced when he was two, after which he and... Read more »
In her landmark 1985 work, The Body in Pain, American essayist Elaine Scarry makes a case for the “unsharability” of pain and its resistance to language. “Physical pain,” she writes, “does not simply... Read more »
Samantha Ellis yearns to eat the nabug fruit that her Iraqi-Jewish parents recall from Baghdad back gardens. Yet when she asks for it in London’s Iraqi shops, she’s met only with blank... Read more »
Tuppence Middleton was 11 years old when her parents realised something wasn’t right. It was 1998 and they had told their daughter – who was just emerging from a four-month bout of chronic fatigue... Read more »
“The Secret Painter” here is Joe Tucker’s uncle Eric, apparently the most unaesthetic of men, inhabiting the most unaesthetic of places, the industrial town of Warrington, Lancashire. He kept his trousers up... Read more »
Al Pacino, whose nickname âSonny Boyâ comes from the Al Jolson song of that title, begins this fine memoir in 1943 when he is three and his mother, Rose, a pretty, sensitive... Read more »