Books

Constance Maud’s suffragette novel No Surrender, first published in 1911, isn’t what I would call an enticing read, however authentic a record it may be of its author’s times (Maud, the daughter of a Surrey rector, joined the Women’s Freedom League in 1908, and thereafter participated enthusiastically in the same kind of peaceful civil disobedience as her characters). While it’s true that Emily Wilding Davison, the woman who would later be trampled beneath the King’s horse at Epsom, adored it, feeling that it breathed the…

At the age of 68, the author and academic Anthony Seldon set out on a 1,000km trek in search of peace. He has always been restlessly ambitious. He has served as headmaster of Wellington College and vice-chancellor of the (private, though non-profit) University of Buckingham, while producing dozens of comment pieces for newspapers and books on recent history, including celebrated studies of post-second world war British prime ministers. But by 2020 his hyperactive life had started to unravel.His beloved wife, Joanna, had…

Millions of circumstances and situations might arrange themselves in an intimate pattern to shape an individual. A majority of these circumstances are beyond the person’s control and their cumulative influence is perhaps too complex to understand. Revisiting childhood and writing about it could be both amusing and exciting provided the simplest events are looked at with a bit of whimsy to make them interesting, allowing the ghosts to finally rest in peace between the pages. In her beautifully written memoir, the actor…

WHO DOESN’T WANT to be happy? At the end of the day, you might think, it’s happiness that matters most – it’s the reason for everything we do. This idea goes back to classical antiquity. According to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, whatever we pursue in life – “honour, pleasure, reason, and every virtue” – we choose “for the sake of happiness” since happiness “is the end of action”. Around this all-consuming aim we’ve built a multibillion-dollar industry: self-help.Not that there haven’t been critics. “Humanity…

No RemedyNo remedy, my retrospective friend,We’ve found no remedy;Nor from these fields the briared and barbed wire endCan keep our enemy,To mend the gapsWould take perhaps a century.So, praise each other’s poem though we may,The day of easy speechSucceeded soon by love and fright, and theyMade madness out of reachGave way in turnTo speed to learn, vain wish to teach,Success and jealousy their unsought sons; That day won’t leap again,As when some amateur card trickster runsHis hands through all the plainCards, stuns the…

Back in what now seems like the distant past – August – a biography of Liz Truss looked to be a well-timed book for the Tory shires Christmas market. Two of the maddest months in recent history later and Out of the Blue by the Sun’s political editor, Harry Cole, and James Heale of the Spectator became a joke social media meme, with a fake image showing the cover at a hugely knocked down price doing the rounds.You have to feel for the biographers, whose rushed book originally had the subtitle: “The inside story of Liz…

Not long before he won the life-changing role of Chandler Bing in the global sitcom phenomenon Friends, Matthew Perry prayed: “God, you can do whatever you want to me. Just please make me famous.” In this memoir, Perry talks about achieving that mammoth success and fame: at its peak, the series’ cast members were each earning more than a million dollars an episode. But his book is chiefly about the titular “Big Terrible Thing”: Perry’s alcoholism and painkiller/opioid addiction (OxyContin, Vicodin, Dilaudid, to name a…

In 2020, poet and podcaster Derek Owusu won the Desmond Elliott prize for his debut novel, That Reminds Me, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age narrative about K, a young Ghanaian man who’s grown up in Britain, which Owusu began writing in the wake of a mental breakdown. He now follows it with Losing the Plot, a playfully pointed title for a book that is very much a companion to its predecessor, not least in terms of its category-confounding form.The paragraphs that make up its short, impressionistic chapters often…

Breadcrumb Trail Links News Culture Canada Books Instead of despairing about tuned-out 18-year-olds, we should be firing up the interest of eight-year-olds A small-scale survey of Grade 6 and 7 students attending a range of Toronto schools found Grade Six students couldn’t say what country Nelson Mandela came from. Photo by Trevor Samson/AFP via Getty Images Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from…

Breadcrumb Trail Links Life Eating & Drinking Culture Books The Toronto-based writer and photographer offers countless reasons to celebrate an essential ingredient we now take for granted Get the latest from Laura Brehaut straight to your inbox Sign Up The Miracle of Salt is Naomi Duguid's ninth book. Photo by Naomi Duguid/Richard Jung Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from…