Culture

Alexandra Shulman says that she had ‘no desire to write an autobiography’ — so instead she has written about her clothes, and given us some scintillating reading. For despite having edited British Vogue for 25 years, until she retired in 2017, Shulman’s relationship with fashion at times reads less like a love affair than a marital tiff. Take, for example, the bra, which is the subject of chapter three. ‘There’s a point in most women’s lives when shopping for bras is consigned to one of those special places in hell,’ Shulman writes, revealing that, aged 17, she gave up, and didn’t wear a bra again for 20 years. (‘It wasn’t anything to do with lofty feminist ideals but simply that I hated how they felt.

The name Arthur Jeffress may not conjure many associations for those not familiar with the London post-war art world, but this wayward, flamboyant, controversial connoisseur and patron who left much of his ‘small but subversive’ collection to the Tate and the Southampton Art Gallery after his death in 1961 certainly deserves his footnote in history. ‘Small but subversive’ could describe the man as well as his collection: his fabulous wealth, inherited from Virginian tobacco plantation-owning ancestry, coupled with his rampant homosexuality, shaped a life of compulsive and conspicuous extravagance, in which art and sex vied with one another for supremacy against the backdrop of Belgravia and a palazzo just off the Grand Canal in Venice.

Between October 2013 and January 2014, five teenaged boys from Brighton, three of them brothers from a family called Deghayes, travelled to Syria to join Jabhat al-Nusra, an Islamist militia and one of the main jihadist groups fighting the Syrian army. A dozen more young people from Brighton were also eager to go. Radicalisation had swept through the group like a ‘contagion’, catching parents and police unawares and baffling counter-extremism experts. In his disturbing No Return, Mark Townsend traces the various hidden causes of the Deghayes case, events that he claims ‘transformed the entire approach of the government’s counter-extremism programme, both in policy and ideology’.

From the kitchen of her apartment on the Quai de la Tournelle in Paris, the journalist and broadcaster Agnès Poirier could see the bright yellow plumes of smoke rising into the sky. Notre-Dame de Paris was on fire, and suddenly, in that tourist-crowded, hyper-expensive ‘cradle of France’, nothing was certain — ‘democracy, peace and fraternity’ — any more. The following morning, children living on or near the Île de la Cité took to school little plastic bags filled with blackened bits of roof picked up from balconies and pavements (as well as probably quite a lot of lead dust) which ‘dated back to the Crusades’.

On a winter’s night an artist of moderately exalted reputation and in lateish middle age journeys across London, away from the stuccoed comforts of what was until recently home towards a studio in the East End, where a much younger lover lies waiting. Observations, generally of a caustic nature, about the comédie humaine encountered along the way and the state of the wider world jostle in the artist’s febrile mind with an apologia for the previous nine months’ events.The artist is a woman, Eve Laing, but the tropes past which Nightshade flits like an Underground train are strikingly, almost mundanely, male — the ageing, status-anxious creative, the mid-life crisis, the much younger lover, even the caustic observations.

How can you recover the teenage girl you were? Not just recall the memories and recount the events — this dress worn at that party, the taste of that alcohol on this boy’s mouth — but restore the world in which these things took place, and the self who acted and was acted upon. Is it possible to be your own Orpheus and yank the Eurydice of your former self from the underworld of forgetting? This is the problem that Annie Ernaux sets herself in this slim, transfixing memoir of young adulthood and first sexual experience. It’s 2014 and Ernaux is looking at a picture. The picture was taken in 1958 and the girl in it is 17. The girl is Ernaux, and also she isn’t.