Autobiography

Giorgia Meloni has emerged as one of the most significant politicians in Europe since she became Italy’s first female prime minister in October 2022. I Am Giorgia, already a bestseller in Italy, is her account of how a short, fat, sullen, bullied girl – as she describes her young self – from a poor, single-parent family in Rome managed to do it. Her explanation is that she refused to play the victim, and found iron in her soul – even if, as she admits, she has never found happiness. It is an amazing story: how she transformed from an ugly duckling into the swan who is now a familiar figure

Edmund White grew up in a world where sex, and gay sex in particular, was an unspoken reality. In 1950s Cincinnati, ‘no one “came out” except drag queens and the campy peroxided waiter at the diner’, he writes in the first chapter of The Loves of My Life. That blanket of near-silence doesn’t seem to have inhibited him much. He was sexually precocious from the age of 12, as his autobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story (1982) first suggested. But it may account for the determined frankness with which he has treated sex in both his fiction and memoirs. For an author who came of age in pre-liberation America, erotic

Winston Churchill hoped and expected his autobiography, My Early Life, to be read as much as literature as history, and also as an adventure story. He dedicated it ‘To a New Generation’, and it was especially intended to inspire people in their early twenties. ‘Twenty to 25, those are the years,’ he wrote. ‘Don’t be content with things as they are.’  Aged 56, Churchill was singularly discontented with things as they were. He was out of office and out of favour with his party, and had already entered his ‘wilderness years’.  There is no better revelation of Churchill’s character, including his sense of humour, than My Early Life Because My

This is a very odd book. Where you’d expect to find an author’s photo inside the dust-jacket it just says: ‘Cher is a global icon.’ As for the ending – there isn’t one. It feels as though the publishers snatched the manuscript out of Cher’s hands almost mid-sentence, saying: ‘Keep the rest for Part Two.’ Still, it’s a breathlessly exciting story. With 5,000 screaming fans at the airport, success had arrived. And Cher was still only 19 ‘I mean, jeez, my family,’ Cher exclaims at one point, ‘you couldn’t make it up.’ Her mother Jackie Jean, a dazzling beauty from a dirt-poor Arkansas background, had been taught not to sleep

We know of the Durrells mainly through their own writings, outstandingly My Family and Other Animals, about their years in Corfu in the 1930s, and from the image of them created by TV and film adaptations of this work. Gerald and Lawrence were the best known members of the family, the first as a zoologist and conservationist, the second as an experimental writer. Their siblings, Margaret (Margo) and Leslie, will always be perceived through the lens Gerald turned on them in My Family – the former as a flighty eccentric, something like an extra from a Carry On film, the latter as a pantomime villain. Their mother, Louisa, was loved

There’s only one Cincinnatus in the Cotswolds, and it’s not Boris Johnson. Over the Rainbow tells the story of how, once again, Alex James was torn from his life in a very big house in the country to fulfil his national duty to play bass with Blur. The tale comes in the form of a diary, like Brian Eno’s wonderful A Year with Swollen Appendices, except that this is a year with inflated egos. To make sure our sympathies are in the right place, it begins with a preamble at the end of December 2022, during which the author attends a series of parties, each more wearisomely smug than the

Ellen Barkin, Al Pacino’s lover-cum-prime- suspect in his comeback movie Sea of Love (1989), once dismissed the artifice of the British acting tradition (by way of an oddly ill-tempered pop at Nigel Havers) by comparing it with the immersive naturalism of the greats of post-war American cinema: Marlon Brando, Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. It’s a questionable claim, especially given that in Pacino Barkin had perhaps the least naturalistic co-star imaginable. He is forever searching for the off-beat, the syncopation that will spring the line open Pacino is – albeit in his own highly idiosyncratic way – no less theatrical an actor than John Gielgud, more invested

According to Clive James: ‘A life without fame can be a good life, but fame without a life is no life at all.’ In My Family: The Memoir, the famous comedian David Baddiel proves he’s also had a life. Or, at least, a family. For anyone who hasn’t been paying attention – and Baddiel, as he admits, craves attention – or who has never watched television or listened to the radio over the past 30 or 40 years, Baddiel is famous as a stand-up comedian specialising in a ‘sweary and often not-very-nice-Jewish-boy style of comedy’, as a TV chat show host with fellow comedian Frank Skinner, presenting Fantasy Football League

Michel Leiris (1901-90) was one of those intellectual adventurers who are the astonishment of French literature in the 20th century. Their achilles’ heel is that most were communists, in a few cases Nazis; and nothing kills the life of the mind more thoroughly than preaching. Their saving grace is that many were eccentric characters, and their autobiographical work can often be their most luminous legacy. Among Leiris’s subjects are his dogs, his ideal hotel, his hatred of Wagner, his Anglophile snobbery and his tailor Because they were anti-form, the ideal prose vehicles became ‘aphorism’ or ‘fleuve’. The most brilliant of the French aphorists, Emile Cioran (though he was Romanian), exclaimed

Wimbledon’s starched whites, manicured flower beds and hushed silence enable tennis to present itself as a genteel sport. But Wimbledon only represents tennis in the way that an Olympic 100m final represents athletics. It is the best players in the best setting for a brief period. Actual tennis, the day-to-day life of a regular player on the circuit, is very different. It is relentless, stingy and unsentimental. The most surprising thing about The Racket, Conor Niland’s bruising account of his career as a good (but not great) tennis player, is that he emerges with both his sanity and his compassion intact. Tennis is not an easy game to break into.

The frontispiece of this book is Lucian Freud’s portrait of his daughter Rose naked on a bed. Rose says that when her father asked her to sit, which she had long hoped he would do, she naturally assumed he would want her naked, but asked him not to paint her hairy legs. He, in turn, asked her to remove her mascara, but she refused. When she saw the canvas she was shocked at how much it focused on her vulva, but she did not object. She sat for him at night – he had other sitters during the day – and he sometimes gave her purple hearts to keep awake.

This year marks the centenary of the publication of The Waste Land, the poem that made T.S. Eliot famous. His story is familiar and yet still surprising. What is well known: Ezra Pound whipped The Waste Land into shape, it was published in The Dial and then The Criterion, and it was quickly recognised as a poem of great importance. Eliot emerged as the poet of his age and his views on the ‘impersonality’ of poetry would dominate the next several decades of poetry and criticism. What is less well known is how Eliot’s work was shaped and influenced by a few key women. This dynamic is what Lyndall Gordon’s

McEwanesque. What would that even mean? The dark psychological instability of The Comfort of Strangers and Enduring Love? The gleeful comedy of Solar and Nutshell? The smart social realism of Saturday and The Children Act? The metafictional games of Atonement and Sweet Tooth? Ian McEwan’s brilliant capacity for reinvention is a hallmark of his literary career. It’s simpler to say what McEwanesque is not: baggy, meandering, plotless, long. Yet all of these adjectives could be applied to his surprising new novel, Lessons. This cradle-to-grave (well, seven-ish to seventy-something) narrative concerns the life and times of Roland Baines, born, like McEwan, in 1948. Roland shares more than just a birth date

There is a trend for books in which academics write personally about their engagement with literature. Examples include Lara Feigel’s Free Woman, in which the author blends a memoir of her marriage break-up with a close reading of Doris Lessing’s fiction, and Sally Bayley’s Girl With Dove, which fuses an account of a traumatic childhood with sketches that focus on Bayley’s early love of books. Addressed to a wider readership, these works combine autobiography with literary criticism. They are carefully crafted, confessional and ask why literature matters. The advantage of this approach is that it avoids the pitfalls of the now highly professional discipline of English Literature, dominated in universities

This is a book about George Orwell’s recognition that desire and joy can be forces of opposition to the authoritarian state and its intrusions. To explore the theme, Rebecca Solnit has produced a sequence of loosely linked essays around the roses and fruit bushes the author of Animal Farm planted in 1936 in the garden of his modest Hertfordshire house. A Californian with more than 20 books behind her, Solnit opens this latest with a pilgrimage to Wallington, where Orwell’s Albertine roses have endured. The blooms instigate a reconsideration of the man ‘most famous for his prescient scrutiny of totalitarianism’, which in turn invites the author ‘to dig deeper’ and

Real Estate is the third and concluding volume of Deborah Levy’s ground-breaking ‘Living Autobiography’. Fans of Levy’s alluring, highly allusive fiction will appreciate the insights into her life; moreover, anyone with an ounce of curiosity will be fascinated by her compelling tour of city streets, island rocks and meandering diversions into ideas from a wealth of writers and artists. We begin the book with the author buying a plant from a flower stall. (Our modern-day Mrs Dalloway purchases a banana tree in Shoreditch rather than cut flowers in Westminster.) Levy then steps from this familiar act of flower-buying into the world of Georgia O’Keeffe, and we accompany her ‘from the

If 2020 has given us something to talk about other than Covid, it’s been history — and, more precisely, to whom history belongs and how we’ve chosen to define it. Well into the modern era, the philosopher Thomas Carlyle’s definition of the subject as ‘the biography of great men’, seems to endure. Most remember their school history lessons as a force-fed diet of monarchs’ names, battles and key dates, or as a narrative about palace-dwelling elites whose experiences seemed utterly removed from reality. It is undoubtedly why the subject in its most uncut Victorian form can seem so unpalatable to the general public. Conversely, it also goes a long way