autobiography

It looks like it’s raining Range Rovers in Bollywood. We say this because yet again another super popular Bollywood celeb has bought himself a new Range Rover. This time around, it has been reported that the “Fighter” movie star Hrithik Roshan has bought himself a brand-new Range Rover. The actor was recently spotted arriving at Farah Khan’s party at Mumbai in his new SUV. The video of Hrithik Roshan arriving at the party in his new Range Rover has been shared on YouTube by Bollywood Mirchii on their page. In…

One day, Liz Jensen’s son, Raphaël, meets death in the garden. It’s a bird: a great tit that he picks up and brings inside. ‘‘I found a sleeping bird,’’ he says to his mother, who explains that this particular bird will not be waking up. They dig a hole for it and hold a funeral. “Not a bird any more, we tell him. Underground, it will rot and magic into something else. But this makes no sense to him. He puts snail shells on the little grave and howls.”At the age of 25, Raphaël meets death again. He is on a training run in…

There is a moment at the end of every series of RuPaul’s Drag Race, the Emmy-winning drag queen reality competition, in which the glamorous host asks the finalists to address their younger selves with words of advice and encouragement. No matter how many times you have seen this happen (since its inception in 2009, there have been 16 US seasons, 20 international editions, eight all-star versions and two celebrity spin-offs), watching the contestants open up about their darkest days remains an astonishingly effective…

This honest and troubled memoir belongs to a genre one may shorthand as I-was-Sinatra’s-valet: how an ordinary day jobber encountered a star and found life glitteringly transformed. Here it’s a 21-year-old hairdresser, Suzi Fussey, living at home with her parents in Bromley, south-east London, and working at a salon in neighbouring (“posher”) Beckenham. One day in 1970 a customer, Mrs Jones, mentions her “artistic” son, David, who plays in a band; the following week, she brings in David’s wife, Angie, who wants a haircut…

The concept of “genius loci” – the spirit of a place, often with a connotation of protection or nurturing – is the foundation of Esther Rutter’s revivifying blend of memoir, literary history and travelogue. Eliding three books into one, she explores her own terrifying mental collapse and tentative recovery, the lives of Romantic poet William Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy and their confrère Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the efforts to preserve the Wordsworths’ cottage at Grasmere within the context of the Lake District as…

Enthusiasts are invariably perceived to be an odd bunch, outliers who tend to congregate among the safety of one another. There they stand on station platforms and near airport runways, in cagoules, jotting down numbers of trains and watching jets take off. Those who contain their obsessions indoors might treasure stamps or mount butterflies on pins. It passes the time.The writer Nicholas Royle collects books. When he’s not reading them, he’s writing them (he’s the author of seven novels, two novellas and four short story…

Few autobiographies are as suited to audio as Surrender, in which U2 frontman Bono reflects on nearly 50 years in music using his band’s songs as his guide. The book opens with the singer – who narrates – undergoing heart surgery to deal with a blister on his aorta that was ready to “put me in the next life faster than I can make an emergency call”.He looks back on his life, describing the death of his mother from a stroke when he was 14 – he believes it was this that led him to become a performer, seeking the love from…

Following the death of her beloved father in 1987, Catherine Coldstream was plunged into spiritual crisis. Convinced she could still feel his presence, she was consumed by thoughts of the afterlife and the fate of the disembodied spirit. A three-year search for deeper meaning and “a transcendent source of love” eventually led her to the Carmelites, a Roman Catholic order based on the hermits who inhabited caves on the mystical Mount Carmel. For Coldstream, they represented a new way of living and a chance to do God’s…

In August, 2014, Diane Foley went to church in Rochester, New Hampshire. Her son, Jim, a photojournalist, had then been a hostage of Islamic State in Syria for almost two years. It was late at night, and she was exhausted and alone. The US government, insistent that it would not pay ransoms to terrorists, would do nothing for her family; it was hellish living in fear of the sound of the telephone; the waiting and the wondering could drive a person mad. And so, here she was, clicking her rosary beads, kneeling to repeat…

The world of private equity, as described in Carrie Sun’s memoir, brings to mind less the muscular jockeying of HBO’s Succession, and instead the quiet intensity of a Sofia Coppola film: all glittering surfaces and cagey alienation. When Sun arrives at Carbon, a secretive hedge fund (the name has been changed), she finds offices with sweeping views of Central Park; a library with heavy drapes and velvet couches; a bathroom with marble sinks and stone walls. After employees complain about the state of the toilets, the firm…