Biography & Memoir

Ihad​ planned to become a doctor – I imagined working in a hospital in a tropical country like Dr Schweitzer. I graduated in 1963, but being unable to afford medical school I joined the...

Taking a leap in the dark – and is this not what the bounding horses lining the ceiling of Lascaux’s axial gallery ask us to do? – Jean-Luc Champerret proposes that the grids act as frameworks for...

29 May, Yorkshire. I’ve lost count of the number of times on TV I’ve seen the sequence whereby a dead lamb is skinned and the skin fitted onto an orphaned lamb which is then foisted on a bereaved sheep...

At some point​ on a night out an older queen will swing down from the rafters to let you know you’re too late. Five, maybe ten years ago, he explains, it was much better here. The music was better,...

The literary stomach of the world is a goat’s, not a hummingbird’s, and Karl Ove Knausgaard knows it. He tosses us crumpled newspapers, cardboard cups, grocery lists – all the detritus that makes...

Sebald’s deep preoccupation is with what his character Jacques Austerlitz calls ‘the marks of pain’, psychological and physical, in human and other animals. These marks are indelible, and for some...

Who cared if it was a low-budget British production, the sort that still tours provincial towns, advertised in newsagent doorways: to sit in the dark, to chew down a hotdog with scalding onions, to watch...

George’s defenders cannot have it both ways. Either they take the king whole, hot and strong and stubborn to the last; or they have to sideline him as an endearing nullity. To present him as a great...

Reading books like this, I feel like a Philip K. Dick character in the grip of wild-eyed madness. I want to run around telling the authors to snap out of it, to stop wasting their time and their Sontag...

The​ great realisation of the Stan Lee era at Marvel was that heroes didn’t need to be paragons. They could be anxious teenagers with money worries, like Spider-Man, or members of a bickering pseudo-family,...

I am haunted by the figure of Rolanda Polonsky, walking through the hospital corridors. If my eight-year-old self had opened the doors that frightened me I might have found her, back then, exactly as she...

Thinking is what Arendt probably claimed to have been spending whole days doing: ‘the two in one’, ‘the soundless dialogue ... between me and myself’. She would be thinking, and she would be smoking;...

One​ of the last things Gertrude Beasley wrote before her disappearance in 1927 was an article called ‘I Was One of Thirteen Poor White Trash’. It came out in Hearst’s...

In Uwe Johnson’s work, perspective doesn’t come from a bird’s-eye view but from staying at eye level – from looking and never stopping. His characters are suspicious of any claim that there is...

Craxton liked small jokes, hiding the date of a painting in the label on a bottle of beer, or turning his signature into part of the pattern on a cigarette packet. His art had become a quest for colour,...

In Memory of Memory shows that the compulsive wish to remember and be remembered is in no way peculiar to the digital age. Maria Stepanova sees our obsession with genealogy websites, with social media...

When people in Louisiana say that a city will disappear, they don’t just mean that it will be taken over by industry, or abandoned after one too many hurricanes or floods. They mean that it will actually...

Richard Wright wasn’t interested in the structures of support or mutual aid that enabled black people to survive as a collective. He was drawn to outcasts and desperados who had fallen through the cracks...