Memoir

Goldman Sachs inspires awe and envy in equal measure. Those who survive the Wall Street investment bank’s annual cull earn fortunes. Leavers join an alumni network that makes the Freemasons look like plodders. The ‘Government Sachs’ roll call includes prime ministers (Mark Carney, Mario Draghi, Rishi Sunak and Australia’s Malcolm Turnbull); US Treasury secretaries (Bob Rubin and Hank Paulson); and central bank governors galore, not to mention two recent BBC chairmen (Gavyn Davies and Richard Sharp).  After the global financial crisis, which Goldman navigated more adroitly than rivals, Rolling Stone compared the bank to ‘a vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity’. New York magazine ran a cover story

The leaves had yet to fall as Melvyn Bragg left his native Cumbria and arrived in Oxford by train in the autumn of 1958 to read Modern History at Wadham College. Weighed down with suitcases, the grammar-school boy admired the town’s medieval core; but his first impression was of ‘effortless wealth and privilege everywhere’. Oxford was still largely dominated by public schoolboys, but it also featured those who had served in uniform, which added a note of gravitas to the atmosphere. On both counts, it was foreign terrain to Bragg, who pined for the familiar sights and sounds of his close-knit hometown of Wigton: ‘I could close my eyes and

‘Pinball games, with their flashing lights and unforgettable names, are the one thread that runs together my otherwise fragmentary life.’ So writes Andreas Bernard in the last sentence of this touchingly Proustian memoir. He hymns a life spent flipping small steel balls up and down machines which, despite their clamorous lights, bleeps and honks, amounted to glorified beer coasters and ashtrays, usually in dank corners next to the toilets of some German bar, Italian resort arcade or glum rest stop on California’s Pacific highway. The subtitle is misleading: the book is Bernard’s biography, not the pinball machine’s. He begins his tale as a pre-pubescent, sneaking into Munich bars with his

Michael Moritz, one of Silicon Valley’s most successful venture capitalists, really has got it in for Donald Trump. America is currently in a ‘dark age’ of authoritarian governance, he claims, which spurns legality and liberal do-gooders everywhere. As a lifelong Democrat, Moritz was appalled when, in 2017, Trump failed to denounce the alt-right protestors who chanted ‘Jews will not replace us!’ at a torchlit rally in Virginia. Understandably, Moritz is alarmed by the tide of anti-Semitism today. His Jewish parents narrowly escaped death in Hitler’s Germany when they came to the UK on the Kindertransport. The 71-year-old Moritz now asks the question: how long before the iron-studded jackboot returns to

Growing up in the 1960s at 288a Main Road on the outskirts of Northampton, Mark Haddon spent hours alone in the bathroom, the only lockable room in the house, trying to figure out the universe. In this dark, sui-generis memoir he writes: Even now, insoluble conundrums such as ‘Why was I born as me and not someone else?’ and ‘If the universe is expanding, then what is it expanding into?’ come packaged with images of a shampoo bottle in the shape of a fat sailor with a twist-off head. The author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time has a scientifically inclined mind in which small physical

I’m lucky. I’ve only visited a family court once, and that was as a journalist rather than a party to a case. One detail stuck with me. On the wall in the waiting area was a poster preparing attendees for the layout of the courtroom: the judge goes here, the barristers go here, and you go here and wait for your fate – for your children’s fate – to be decided. It was a reminder that, however much family courts have become friendlier in recent years (notably, family court judges stopped wearing wigs in 2008), these are still places that confound and alienate those hoping for justice. That is, whatever

This vivid account of a young English-woman caught up in the Russian Revolution was first published in 1919 as Under Cossack and Bolshevik, but it’s possibly even more gripping today. Rhoda Power, a political science graduate, was 26 when she was hired as a tutor to a 16-year-old Russian girl, Natasha Sabaroff, living in Rostov-on-Don. Going to Russia had for years been one of her dreams, so off she sailed from Newcastle to Bergen through U-boat-infested seas; and, indeed, future sailings were cancelled after four ships were torpedoed. But she arrived safely in Bergen, where the Cook’s man put her on a train to Petrograd (St Petersburg), which she spent

The filmmaker Cameron Crowe had the coolest childhood. Growing up in California, he started writing for Rolling Stone magazine at the age of 15. His big break came in 1973, when he had the chance to interview the Allman Brothers Band, then one of America’s biggest rock groups, for a cover piece.  For days he tagged along with the rockers on tour, winning their trust with his passion for music and open, honest, moon-shaped face, while phoning his mother every evening to assure her that he wasn’t taking drugs. Finally he earned an interview with the troubled Greg Allman himself, who, shirtless on a bed, spoke about the loss of

A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever – credited to the late Rob Reiner, with Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, as well as to their Tap alter-egos Marty Dibergi, Nigel Tufnel, David St Hubbins and Derek Smalls – serves as a fitting companion to This is Spinal Tap (1984), the mother of all mockumentaries, much beloved by middle-aged men and their poor put-upon children. (My wife and my daughter, I should say, absolutely hate it: but then they prefer Pitch Perfect – and Pitch Perfect 2. So there’s no accounting for taste.) Part oral history, part behind-the-scenes memoir and part self-aware parody of rock memoir, the book’s a

The punk icon Patti Smith’s latest memoir stretches from 1940s Michigan to present-day Nice, weaving around and complementing her other works of autobiography in its rendering of formative scenes. These include descriptions of periods of childhood illness, displays of sibling loyalty, powerful encounters with art and poetry, attachment to beloved clothes, marriage to Fred and the deaths of people close. Smith looks ahead to a time when she and her dwindling companions are gone: ‘Write for that future, says the pen.’ Our attention is periodically drawn to the pen’s motion as it ‘scratches across the page’, conjuring a lifetime of fluctuation. Smith opens with a recollection of waving her arms

A beguiling cinema advert back in the 1970s showed a young man with a series of doors closing around him with resounding clunks. First, he was hemmed in by the boredom of school, then work, and finally a mortgage – but as soon as he got the keys to his first motorbike, he could hit the open road and escape to freedom. Vroom, vroom. I seem to remember the initial scenes were in grim black and white, but when he got the bike everything switched to vibrant colour – although that may be false memory syndrome. He salutes other bikers with majestic waves – until he realises this makes him

In 2022, at the age of 58, Justin Currie – singer, bass-player and main songwriter with the Scottish rock band Del Amitri – faced what might be mildly termed a series of setbacks. In short order his mother died, his long-term partner suffered a catastrophic stroke, leaving her requiring constant care, and he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. About the first two there was not much to be done but weep. When it came to the third, Currie decided he would manage the ‘Ghastly Affliction’ (the ‘GA’ as he calls it) as best he could with medication and keep playing music as long as he was able to. The following year

Mark Ronson has one of the finest heads of hair in all showbusiness. The music producer’s coiffure is a dark, whipped and quiffed thing that makes it look as though he naturally belongs on a Vespa in Capri, being ogled by the belle ragazze as he scoots on by. As a cultural object, it certainly surpasses the Oscar he won for the songs in that Lady Gaga remake of A Star is Born; it probably equals his Barbie soundtrack; and maybe even approaches the hits he made with and for Amy Winehouse. But it wasn’t always like that. Back in the 1990s, Ronson’s hair was a standard-issue crop, while he