The spark for this remarkable memoir was a scribbled list of paintings that belonged to the Parisian author's great-grandparents - Degas, Renoir, Monet, Tiepolo etc - of which she knew nothi... read more
The story of PayPal, a Silicon Valley startup with a few scruffy tech-heads at the helm. It is now one of the most successful and ubiquitous companies in the world, whose alumni aren't doing... read more
Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Iris Murdoch & Philippa Foot: they got to know one another as Oxford students during WW2, and went on to have huge influence on subsequent decades.
Manon Gropius (1916-1935) was the daughter of Walter and Alma. Her attempts to free herself from maternal expectations and the recurrent image of herself in her stepfather's novels are movin... read more
Slim but far-reaching memoir of the author's brush with suicide, framed as the consequence of familial trauma and isolation. Superbly written, this bears honourable comparison with William S... read more
A riotous memoir of attempting to mount a Bacon exhibition in the last days of the USSR; apparatchiks, honey-traps, the KGB - has the author's liver ever recovered?
In 1864 the Austrian Archduke Maximilian went to assume a distant throne. The operatic episode ended in his death by firing squad, famously memorialised by Manet.
A memoir of life as a small girl in Rabindranath Tagore's famous cultural community in the 1930s, by one of India's foremost literary figures. Translated from the Bengali. (Originally due fo... read more
Translated from the French, a biography of the complex Swiss founder of the Red Cross, a devout Christian and social activist, but also an ambitious - and unsuccessful - businessman.
Rewarding as a study on Bacon - it gets closer to understanding his enigma than anything has since - this memoir is also a tribute to Sylvester's clarity and verve. A re-issue, this was firs... read more
A memoir by the Egytian woman who set up an independent book shop with a friend and her sister in 2002 - ten years later it had grown to include ten shops and 150 employees. Full of the nois... read more
A traditional rock climber for a decade or more, Fleming describes the dance between the self and the rock and its electrifying charge. It's also, for her, the ultimate way to connect with n... read more
Hannah Arendt's first book was about one of the most important and complicated figures in German romanticism, although her gender and Jewishness set her uneasily amongst her contemporaries.