Lola Young Eight Weeks Looking back, moving forwards, defying the odds 336pp. Penguin. Paperback, £10.99. Lola Young has been a crossbench member of the House of Lords since 2004. She is also an emeri

My fresher’s year at Edinburgh University offered a few rude awakenings. The first: learning the university had run out of self-catered accommodation. The next was that the uni’s solution was to have

The Disappearing Act concerns a novelist in her fifties who lives in an unnamed European country and is on her way to a literary festival in an unnamed location. Her name is given only as “M”. We vagu

“As movers and the moved both know”, John Updike noted, “books are heavy freight ... They make us think twice about changing addresses.” Books: A manifesto, or, How to build a library begins with the

THE LIBRARY OF TRAUMATIC MEMORY Tragic moments ★ ...

There was a night as a boy when I couldn’t sleep ahead of a football match, too wired by thoughts of the sporting heroics I might achieve—or fall short of—the next day. While tossing and turning in my