memoir
Sunday Book: Nicholas Hytner - Balancing ActsSunday, 30 April 2017![]() After the first preview of Mike Leigh’s play Two Thousand Years at the National Theatre, a young Guardian reporter accosted an audience member for his view of the play. The audience member gave his name as Nigel Shapps, his... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Min Kym - Gone: A Girl, a Violin, a Life UnstrungSunday, 02 April 2017![]() “What’s it like to be a child prodigy?” is a question asked by violinist Min Kym several times in the course of this fascinating, agonising memoir. There’s no simple answer, but this description rings true: “There’s that peculiar sensation of... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Yiyun Li - Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your LifeSunday, 26 February 2017Yiyun Li’s fiction comes garlanded in praise from authors and journals that don’t ladle it out carelessly, so it feels almost churlish to cavil over a memoir written during the course of two years while the author battled serious mental health... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Günter Grass - Of All That EndsSunday, 04 December 2016![]() In this, his final book, the late German author and Nobel literature laureate tells us that he used to disgust his children with offal-heavy dishes rooted in the peasant fare of his forebears. As modern kids, they turned their noses up at “pigs’... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Elena Ferrante - Frantumaglia: A Writer’s JourneySunday, 06 November 2016![]() The 2003 first, Italian edition of La Frantumaglia begins with words from Elena Ferrante’s publisher, Edizioni E/O, about why the book of collected writings was published: “To satisfy the curiosity of [Ferrante’s] exacting yet generous audience, we... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Alan Bennett - Keeping On Keeping OnSunday, 23 October 2016![]() To settle down on a darkening evening with a new volume of Alan Bennett is to be in the company of an old friend. Someone you don’t see as often as you’d like but with whom you immediately pick up where you left off. Midnight will come and go and... Read more... |
Sunday Book: I Am Brian WilsonSunday, 16 October 2016![]() For decades Brian Wilson was depicted as the mad, lost genius of the Beach Boys, but these days, at 74, he's looking more like one of pop's great survivors. After all, he has comprehensively outlived his brothers Dennis and Carl, and has restored... Read more... |
Extracts: John Tusa - Pain in the ArtsMonday, 16 June 2014![]() In the midst of ferment as the arts world faces fast-shrinking public subsidy, Sir John Tusa, former managing director of the BBC World Service and the Barbican Arts Centre, publishes this week a brisk new book that urges arts and politicians to... Read more... |
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