As a youth she wasnât popular among her peers. âFat and freckly with red hair and mad about horses,â remembers Clarissa Churchill. âWe used to bully her.â Nancy Mitford was no kinder:... Read more »
Sarah Mossâs memoir, the story of how her upbringing developed in her a lifelong, destructive relationship to food, is full of daring. It is a complicated tale and her telling is many-sided,... Read more »
âMadame Bovary, câest moi,â Flaubert said. What would Will Self say of his new novel? âElaine, câest moiâ? âMadame Bovary, câest ma mereâ? Described in the blurb as âperhaps the first work... Read more »
Nancy Fridayâs groundbreaking anthology My Secret Garden: Womenâs Sexual Fantasies was first published in the US in 1973, though Gillian Anderson only read it for the first time when she took on... Read more »
Until fairly recently, anyone asked to name Franceâs most prominent living author might well have said Michel Houellebecq, who shot to prominence in the 1990s and 00s with his novels Whatever, Atomised... Read more »
You could see Peaceâs new book as his third in a series of novels centred on football bosses â the Manageriad? â after The Damned Utd (about Brian Clough) and Red or... Read more »
Robert Harrisâs background in journalism is always evident in his books. The novels themselves are remarkably various, taking us from ancient Rome (his Cicero trilogy) to high finance (2011âs The Fear Index),... Read more »
Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!â roars Michael Corleone in The Godfather: Part III. He wants to put his life of crime behind him and go... Read more »
A brilliant, imaginative woman; a mediocre man with too high an idea of himself, in need of a woman to destroy. Itâs a dynamic that goes back to George Eliotâs Middlemarch or Henry... Read more »