autobiography

Polly Toynbee’s great-grandfather Gilbert Murray, the finest classical scholar of the early 20th century – and, like so many in Toynbee’s family, an activist for what are now called progressive causes – eventually despaired of his hope for the future. “My greenness was unbelievable,” he wrote in a passage Toynbee quotes. “I believed passionately in the progress of man. It was perhaps not quite inevitable, but it only needed the removal of a few selfish and reactionary old people to make the world a new Garden of Eden,…

“Marriage,” writes Devorah Baum, in her incisive and thought-provoking interrogation of the subject, “is a formal relation that could arguably lay claim to being the world’s most enduring and universal.” It’s the plot that drives much of western literature and drama; it is presented to successive generations (especially women) as both the highest goal and a yoke of oppression. It has often been regarded as the most bourgeois and conservative of institutions, while proving flexible enough to accommodate radical…

Not long after my first novel was published, I was invited to a writers’ symposium at UEA in Norwich. The campus is just outside the town and overlooks a lake they call the Broad, where I spent much of my time. I swam under the spell of two books: Charles Sprawson’s Haunts of the Black Masseur and Roger Deakin’s Waterlog, each of which made swimming feel like an expression of the liberated self, a declaration of existential intent. During those strange days in Norfolk, I also stumbled into the university library, where I…

For someone who didn’t grow up in a bookish family, let alone a poetic one, the young Andrew Motion lost no time in making up for his lack of connections. Hurtling back from a sixth-form pilgrimage to Rupert Brooke’s grave in Skyros, Motion is delighted to discover that the war poet’s literary executor, Geoffrey Keynes (brother of John Maynard), lives down the road from him in rural Essex. No sooner has the teenager got himself set up with regular invitations to discuss Brooke than Keynes is ogling his body and giving him…

Harriet the Spy is a 1964 childrens’ book about a little girl who snoops relentlessly on her neighbours. Harriet Gibsone did the same thing when she was young. Now in her late 30s, she still shares with the fictional Harriet a powerful imagination and endless fascination with others. Harriet the Spy was banned in a number of American schools; apparently morally upright people didn’t approve of watchful girls trying to figure out the world on their own terms. I love these characters, nurturing as they do some feeling of…

Michael John Harrison was born two months after VE Day and grew up in semi-rural Warwickshire. His father was an engineer and not much of a reader; the sparsely eclectic selection of books in the Harrison household reflected that fact and included staples such as Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies and a stack of military biographies.“Monty” Harrison died when Mike was 13, taking that whole world with him and with it the sense of stability, even staidness, that characterised his childhood. “I’d bought into writing as an…

Around the time I realised I didn’t want to be married any more, I started visiting Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave,” begins this unusual blend of memoir, criticism and literary biography by the journalist Joanna Biggs. Finding herself newly single, and her mother fading from Alzheimer’s, Biggs might have turned to friends, or drink, or late-night posts on social media.Instead, she looked for comfort in the lives and works of Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath,…

Britney Spears' upcoming autobiography is the talk of the town, but it seems that some of her famous exes are getting cold feet about what she might reveal. According to sources, the pop star's book is set to contain explosive details about her past relationships, causing a stir among some A-listers who fear being exposed. FILE PHOTO: Singer Britney Spears arrives at the 2016 MTV Video Music Awards in New York, U.S.(REUTERS) Publisher Simon & Schuster has put the book on hold after receiving legal letters…

Sadiq Khan’s first book is ostensibly structured as a self-help title in the vein of, say, Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It tackles his commitment to “effective climate action” and presents obstacles – fatalism, apathy, cynicism, deprioritisation, hostility, cost and gridlock – and then addresses how to overcome them. But it is also a memoir in which each one of the seven chapters concerns a new episode in the story of Khan’s political career, framed around the personal awakening that took place in…

Claire Dederer is a journalist from Seattle and the author of two memoirs, the most well known of which is Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses. In 2017, she wrote a piece for the Paris Review entitled What Do We Do With the Art of Monstrous Men? in which she described the experience of rewatching the early films of Woody Allen (Annie Hall, Manhattan) in the context of the allegations of abuse made against him by his adopted daughter, Dylan. The #MeToo movement was then just beginning and this piece, according to her…