MEMOIRS AND AUTOBIOGRAPHIES involving famous relatives are an intriguing read as they offer a backstage pass to history, combining private lives with public myth. After Oscar: The Legacy of a Scandal by Merlin Holland, Oscar Wilde’s only grandson, comes to mind. As does Two Flamboyant Fathers by Nicolette Devas. The daughter of Irish poet Francis...
I LIKE ORIGIN STORIES, especially how a writer came into their powers. Whose life was swept away with a memo from Personnel. How that GP’s news became a license to write stories about divorce. Filthy jobs and warehouse nights. Squats and baggies and needles. That sort of thing. Of course, for some it was all...
A MAJOR RETROSPECTIVE of one of British cinema’s most singular filmmakers, Love, Sex, Religion, Death: The Complete Films of Terence Davies is an extensive season of film screenings at BFI Southbank and beyond. Programmed by BFI Chief Executive Ben Roberts, providing a comprehensive journey through Davies’ body of work, the centrepiece is a UK-wide theatrical...
IT WAS SUNDAY. MÓNICA WANTED to hang a picture on the wall, a small Walter Lazzaro reproduction, and I didn’t want to. The wall wasn’t actually a wall, but one of the four square columns that delineate the perimeter of the room. It’s a narrow column, but wide enough to hang a small picture on...
ONCE I BECAME AN ADULT, I looked back and saw the teenager I had been: studious, insecure, wary of role models, unable to blend in. That young girl – with vain, golden ballet shoes on her feet – couldn’t understand her peers, and at every moment expected a sudden slap, a pocketknife pulled out, a...
I SENT MY FIRST MANUSCRIPT OUT in December 2003, when I was 14. It was a 100,000-word fantasy novel about dragons, and I explained to the lady behind the Post Office counter how I was going to be a published author. She was like, “Ooh, I’ll watch this space.” No agent, at all, wanted to...
“IT’S ABOUT TIME WE ACKNOWLEDGE IT: people are not very good at remembering things the way they really happened. If an experience is an article of clothing, then memory is the garment after it’s been washed, not according to the instructions, over and over again: the colors fade, the size shrinks, the original, nostalgic scent...
WE’RE TWO WEEKS INTO the hottest summer since records began. The chalkland garden outside the house is cringing and wilting despite my best efforts with the old zinc watering can. The molten heat melts candles on windowsills, and the blinds do little to defy the suffocating power of the normally welcome sunshine. I’m hot, bored...
WHEN I WAS A CHILD, my parents would walk me out into the wilds of England’s moorlands in a bright-coloured anorak, wellies that squelched. I didn’t like walking then; I was a sickly child with constant migraines, preferring to read books curled on the sofa. And so, dragged across the barrens with a blinding stick...
DRIVING HER 2CV BACK TO PARIS through the gloomy forests of the Oise, Lucie imagined the dialogue at her trial:“Have you ever been a Nazi?”“Of course! I was a very happy Nazi.”“You really were a Nazi?”“Why not?”“Do you know, you are the very first person we have ever heard confess to it.”Lucie imagined the entire...
HUGE CONGRATULATIONS TO Nussaibah Younis, whose debut social and political satire has been shortlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, having already gathered a truckload of rapturous reviews including The Irish Times, Guardian and The Times, which describes Fundamentally as Bridget Jones in Iraq. This novel, a tale of a heartbroken English academic who...
“READING’S A WASTE OF TIME,” the dental hygienist said, hands in blue rubber gloves, blue rubber gloves in my mouth. I had been reading when she came in and she asked me what? I think I said something like, “oh it’s a biography, but it’s actually not a very good one.” “Yeah,” she said, “I...
