Dr Leyla Sanai is a Persian-British writer and retired doctor who worked as a physician, intensivist, and consultant anaesthetist before developing severe scleroderma and antiphospholipid syndrome
Reading this third memoir by Graham Caveney, a knot in my chest tightened. It wasn’t only because it’s a cancer memoir; it was because the unfolding of history so often shows that abuse begets self-destructive behaviour. To parody Auden: I and the public knowWhat all healthcare staff learnThose to whom evil is doneDestroy themselves in
Ghost Lover by Lisa Taddeo reviewed
Lai Wen’s captivating book about growing up in China and witnessing the horrific massacre reads like a memoir
The latest painting to be attacked by an ovine climate protestor is Monet’s Poppies in Paris’s Musee D’Orsay. Thankfully, the initial reports that the painting was not protected by glass were inaccurate, and the alarming red rectangle – which at first glance looked as if the painting had been torn to the underlying canvas –
Lai Wen’s captivating book about growing up in China and witnessing the horrific massacre in Tiananmen Square reads like a memoir. The protagonist’s name is Lai, and her description of her parents is utterly convincing – the pretty, bitter housewife mother, jealous of the opportunities her daughter has; the father permanently cowed after being briefly
Before I went to medical school I had a hip alternative life. In the 1980s, as a 17 year-old schoolgirl, I wrote for the New Musical Express. My friends assume I had a great time with sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, but the truth is I was such a cautious Carla that I didn’t
There should be a salacious German word for the blissful relief one feels at not being in another’s uncomfortable situation. Not pleasure at their misfortune, as in schadenfreude, just toe-stretching- and-dancing joy that you are safely under a blanket on the sofa while others are undergoing intense public scrutiny. First impressions suggested earnest, caring individuals
Waiting for the Monsoon is an account of the war reporter admirably coming to terms with his terminal diagnosis
When you are a foreign correspondent and have covered wars in dozens of countries, the last place you’d expect a threat to your life to come from is your own cells. Yet this was the predicament in which the New York Times reporter Rod Nordland found himself in July 2019. Despite close shaves in Lebanon,
When Marieke Lucas Rijneveld won the International Booker Prize in 2020 for The Discomfort of Evening, a novel set in the Netherlands about the daughter of a dairy farmer growing up in a strict Christian household in the wake of the tragic death of her brother, the earthy, uncompromising voice was striking. The book was
This year’s Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Frans Hals retrospective at London’s National Gallery are testaments to the enduring appeal of the Dutch artists of the Golden Age. When the 80-year war between Spain and the Dutch Republic ended in 1648, it left the Dutch strong in military and economic terms.
The second volume of his trilogy serves as a prequel to the first, tracing the origins of Norway’s ominous new celestial body
The Wolves of Eternity is the second volume in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s trilogy which began with The Morning Star, but is that book’s prequel. The Morning Star examined events in the lives of various narrators at the time of the appearance of a bright new celestial body, bringing uncharacteristic heat and luminosity to Norway. It
Sebastian Faulks’s new novel poses questions about the meaning of humanity and the significance of difference. Set in the near future – the action starts in 2030 – it centres around Talissa, a clever postgrad anthropologist from New York, who offers to become a surrogate mother to strangers in order to earn money to continue
Elizabeth Day has found her niche as an astute, approachable social anthropologist, observing emotions and behaviour we are reluctant to discuss – such as failure – and draining them of their stigma. Her new book tackles the subject of friendship, which she points out has been far less analysed than romantic relationships. Her honesty and
A plea for the humane management of a most misunderstood disease
The Best Minds is a coruscating indictment of psychiatric services for psychotic patients in the US. It is also a moving and shocking account of the trajectory of Jonathan Rosen’s childhood best friend, Michael Laudor, struck in his youth by schizophrenia, and whose starry ascent through Yale law school to spokesman for stigmatised patients with
Blake Morrison’s previous memoirsAnd When Did You Last See Your Father? (1993) and Things My Mother Never Told Me (2002) examined his parents with the clear-eyed appraisal that only adulthood brings. In the first, he evoked the vigour of his father, Arthur: his sense of fun when rule-breaking for thrills, and the selfish entitlement which
The first three women doctors on the medical register in the UK had not only to study harder than their male counterparts but also to contort themselves in almost impossible ways, jumping from city to city and country to country in order to gain the scientific knowledge and clinical skills that would allow them to
Facing up to the prospect of one’s own mortality is always jarring; but when you’ve spent your life trying, and sometimes failing, to save others from a terrible death, it carries the knowledge that the journey may be more traumatic than the fear or grief of the end. These are the concerns with which Henry
