autobiography

In 2014, the bodies of nearly 800 babies and small children were found in the septic tank of a former mother and baby home in Tuam, Galway. They had been deposited over four decades, a practice that only ended in 1961. This grisly discovery, made by a local historian, forced a long overdue public reckoning in Ireland.Why was it considered necessary, by individual families as well as the Catholic church and the Irish state, to place unmarried pregnant girls in brutal institutions, to subject their babies to coerced…

Missing Persons must have been a very difficult book to write, for certainly it is difficult to read. This is not due to any defects of style or execution – it is an expertly crafted work, at once vigorous and subtle, which manages its effects and conserves its revelations with all the skill of a master novelist. The difficulty for the reader is in struggling to absorb the pain and pity of the story, or stories, which it relates.All families nurse guilty secrets, secret sorrows, as Clair Wills more than once acknowledges.…

When Julian Borger’s father took his own life in London in 1983, his family assumed it was linked to recent events. Robert Borger, a lecturer in psychology at Brunel University, had been passed over for a promotion at work and, after an ultimatum from his wife, Wyn, about his infidelity, had walked out of the family home. But then Borger Jr telephoned Nancy Bingley, who lived in Caernarfon in Wales and had fostered Robert after he arrived from Austria in the late 1930s as a Jewish refugee. On hearing that he had killed…

The American poet Cynthia Zarin was 19 when she first travelled to Venice. The trip was a summer sojourn of sorts with “a boy I thought I might marry”, and the city turned out to be hot and expensive to room in. Zarin and her boyfriend stayed in a grotty boarding house in Padua and took the train to Venice one morning, planning to meet another friend of Zarin’s, who was also making a day trip from Florence. The couple ate veal sandwiches and idled around the steps of the Santa Maria della Salute, but Zarin soon wearied of…

Errollyn Wallen is the composer of 22 operas, and counting, as well as numerous concertos, symphonies, song cycles and chamber works. Her music has been performed at major public celebrations such as the late Queen’s golden and diamond jubilees and the 2012 Paralympic Games. In 2022, she was in the top 20 most performed living composers worldwide. Her first orchestral commission, a concerto for percussion and orchestra, was performed at the Proms in 1998. This was, as she notes modestly in a footnote in her new book, the…

Published posthumously, this autobiography by TN Seshan traces the life of one of India’s gutsiest bureaucrats who, through his reading of laws, brought Indian politicians to their knees. By chronicling his career from the 1950s to the 1990s, this book flings open windows into corridors of power that don’t make for pretty viewing as our politicians appear instinctively unethical. Seshan’s efforts, well-meaning but invariably controversial, gleam through much political muck. Chief Election Commissioner TN Seshan…

In 2006 Wayne Rooney, then a 20-year-old Manchester United forward, signed a £5m deal for five autobiographies to be published over the next 12 years. But two books never surfaced; instead we got kiss-and-tell memoirs from Helen Wood and Jenny Thompson, whose company he bought while his wife, Coleen, was pregnant with their first child, Kai, now a record-breaking goalscorer in United’s youth academy. Her new book skimps on none of that, even if its headline attraction is naturally last year’s legal tussle with Rebekah…

“We only went to Kenya because a Nairobi businessman fumbled in his jacket pocket.” So begins Nicholas Rankin’s hybrid of history and memoir focused on the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s. The businessman’s car keys “snagged the trigger of his Beretta, and he shot himself in the stomach. My father got his job.”Historians don’t write history, they curate it, and in Trapped in History Rankin challenges his own childhood absorption of propagandistic accounts of Britain’s imperial past. Nearly 70 years after his arrival in…

A voice like Barbra Streisand’s is a mystery, even to its owner: two bits of gristle in the throat resonantly swell in her head and chest to produce a storm of sound that Streisand first heard when vocalising in the stairwell of a Brooklyn tenement. Taken to a recording studio by her mother at the age of 14, she gratuitously riffed on a melody and, as she recalls, “something came out of my mouth that completely surprised me”. A decade later in Funny Girl, that finely tuned and amped-up “something” stunned the world. At…

In what might be the most entertaining music memoir since Elton John’s Me, Boy George’s Karma weaves a meandering path through several decades’ of fame, success, crash and burn, before delivering him into a kind of autumnal meditative serenity, aged 62. That it is all wildly discursive, spectacularly catty and occasionally quite mad merely confirms its authenticity. This is George O’Dowd in all his exhausting glory.It isn’t, however, his first memoir; it’s his third. Both 1995’s Take It Like a Man and 2007’s Straight…