The country that separates fathers and sons has disorientated many travellers. It is very easy to get lost there. […] And the fathers must have known, having once themselves been sons, that the ghostly presence of their land will remain […] Hisham Matar’s debut In the Country of Men, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize (2006) and more; his second, Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011), showed his was Read More
Sylvia Patterson’s I’m Not with the Band describes a three-decade long love affair with music. The esteemed journalist’s turbulent life is set against the highs and eventual lows of pop music and the media business she worked in. Her writing, like her first job in music journalism, magazine Smash Hits, mixes silly anecdotes (the favoured Read More
Published 150 years after the publication of Alice in Wonderland, this biography is a real treat of a read. Following his award winning biography of Charles Dickens, Douglas-Fairhurst takes us on a marvellous journey through the mind of the quiet academic Charles Dodgson and his alter ego Lewis Carroll. “‘Who in the world am I?’ Read More
John Aubrey (1625-97) has done it again – namely, got someone else to write his book for him. An odd chain of events is thereby generated. Aubrey – endlessly busying himself in retrieving, preserving, and collating other people’s work, whether contemporary or in England’s recent past – left himself little time or energy to do Read More
German history of the 20th century is an ugly and twisted story to tell . Thomas Harding’s narrative of The House by the Lake takes a personal yet critical approach to this subject. He tells the story of a weekend house at Lake Glienecke, built and once owned by Harding’s Jewish ancestors at the edge of Read More