21st March 2025 Art & architecture


Juliet Bellow Rodin’s Dancers: Art and Performance in Belle Époque Paris


Yale, 10th, HB, £45, 9780300275162


Billed as the first scholarly monograph about Rodin to appear in more than 10 years, this charts the famous sculptor’s relationships with the dancers who shaped both his signature style and his “mythic persona”.


Mark Hearld Raucous Invention Thames & Hudson, 5th, HB, £35, 9780500026854


I love Mark Hearld’s illustrations. Featuring his distinctive collages, textile designs, linocut prints, wallpapers, sculptures and more, this is his celebration of creativity and an “unbridled passion for making”.


James King


‘Our Little Gang’: The Lives of the Vorticists Reaktion, HB, £30, 9781836390558


Exploring the lives and art of the rebellious Vorticists, including Jessica Dismorr, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, whose innovative and abstract creations shattered early 20th-century conventions.


Leslie Primo ( 1) The Foreign Invention of British Art: From Renaissance to Enlightenment


Thames & Hudson, 5th, HB, £30, 9780500024010


Challenging the notion of an exceptional or exclusive British culture, this revisionist book by art historian and broadcaster Primo places the history of British art within a wider political context of xenophobia and influence, to explore the true heritage behind some of the nation’s most defining artworks.


Robert Shore, Eva Rossetti (illus) Blow Up! The Explosion of Contemporary Art


Thames & Hudson, 5th, HB, £18.99, 9781500027981


From Duchamp’s urinal to Cattelan’s banana and Banksy’s self-destructing work of art, this innovative work of graphic non- fiction aims to provide an accessible introduction to contemporary art.


Biography & memoir


Jacinda Ardern A Different Kind of Power Macmillan, 3rd, HB, £25, 9781035045402


Chronicling her extraordinary rise to power at the age of 37, a “deeply personal” memoir by the former prime minister of New Zealand, then the world’s youngest female head of government and only the second to give birth in office. More than a political memoir, I’m told, it is also “an insight into how it feels to lead”.


Camilla Balshaw Named: A Story of Names and Reclaiming Who We Are


Bedford Square, 5th, HB, £18.99, 9781835010716


What do our names tell us about ourselves and why do they matter? This blend of memoir and social and cultural history sets out the author’s own story of identity, examining her relationships with both her Nigerian father and her Jamaican mother.


Joanna Briggs


The Scientist Who Wasn’t There: A True Story of Staggering Deception


Ithaka, 5th, HB, £20, 9781804189726


Renowned scientist Professor Michael Briggs was an eminent adviser to NASA and the World Health Organization. But when he died of a mysterious illness he left behind hundreds of people who believe they are victims of his scientific


Lana Estemirova Please Live: The Chechen Wars, My Mother and Me


John Murray, 19th, HB, £20, 9781399811620


Estemirova is Chechen and works for Justice for Journalists in London. Her mother Natalia was a human rights investigator who was kidnapped outside their apartment block in Grozny in 2009 and later murdered. This is Lana’s story of growing up in war and of the intense bond between a mother and daughter.


Melissa Febos The Dry Season: Finding Pleasure in a Year Without Sex


Canongate, 5th, HB, £16.99, 9781837260096


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In this intimate “can’t live with them, can’t live without them” look at relationships, the author of Girlhood charts her year of celibacy – decided upon in the wake of a disastrous two-year relationship – and the


negligence. Investigating the line between fact and fiction, this memoir by his daughter won the Bridport Prize for an unpublished manuscript.


Susannah Cahalan The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life of Rosemary Woodruff Leary


Canongate, 5th, HB, £22, 9781838857424


The untold story of Rosemary Woodruff Leary – wife of Timothy - who played a critical role in bringing psychedelics into the mainstream, until her audacious exploits forced her into the shadows. This biography aims to restore her status as a pioneering psychedelic seeker.


Sophie Calon Long Going Honno, 19th, PB, £12.99, 9781916821248


At 50, the author’s father was a celebrated lawyer. At 55 he was found dead on a garage forecourt at Christmas. His story, told here in a book that “sings with a daughter’s love for an eccentric father”, is an unflinching account of how alcoholism corrodes a person, and a family.


Rosie Day I Think I Like Girls Piatkus, 19th, HB, £18.99, 9780349442006


From our relationship with our bodies to questions of representation, award- winning actress and film-maker Day shares her experience of exploring her sexuality, coming out and navigating life as a queer woman.


transforming solitude, freedoms and feminist heroes she discovers along the way.


Jo Hamilton Why Are You Here, Mrs Hamilton? The Post Office Scandal and My Extraordinary Fight for Justice


Blink, 19th, HB, £20, 9781785123764


Hamilton was one of more than 700 sub- postmasters prosecuted between 2000 and 2014 based on information from the Post Office’s faulty Horizon accounting system. She looks back on her own battles as part of this high-profile scandal in this memoir, which has a foreword by Sir Alan Bates.


Mina Holland Lifeblood: A Mother in Search of Hope


Daunt, 19th, PB, £10.99, 9781917092081


“No matter the breakage, bliss can prevail.” In this raw and honest memoir, Holland tells of how her baby daughter, Vida, came to be diagnosed with a rare blood disorder called Diamond Blackfan Anaemia and how their family’s life was transformed by the experience.


Molly Jong-Fast How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir


Picador, 26th, HB, £16.99, 9781035029334


Jong-Fast is the only child of Erica Jong, author of feminist novel Fear of Flying. From her mother’s propensity to always say the worst thing to the fact that random people always want to talk to her about her mother, this is her entertaining and affecting memoir of their intense relationship; and her sometimes chaotic upbringing with a “fame-hungry” parent who has now descended into dementia.


Catherine Lacey The Möbius Book Granta, 19th, HB, £16.99, 9781803511474


Exploring the line between memory and the imagination, and her experience of religious faith, this impossible to categorise memoir by acclaimed novelist Lacey – written in the aftermath of a break-up — can be read from either end, and as the title suggests has no clear starting or finishing point. I was gladly caught up in its loop.


Judith Mackrell Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives


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and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John Picador, 19th, HB, £30, 9781529095845


This dual biography of British brother and sister artists Augustus and Gwen John is described as a “powerful portrait” of their remarkable relationship, and how their experiments with form and colour created some of the most memorable work of the 20th century.


Fiona Robertson ( 2) Stone Lands: A Journey of Darkness and Light Through Britain’s Ancient Places


Robinson, 19th, HB, £25, 9781472149183


This original-sounding memoir entwines the author’s grief at her husband’s terminal cancer diagnosis around lessons from ancient stone sites across Britain. Strikingly illustrated with black and white line drawings by illustrator and printmaker, Philip Harris. There’s no proof to hand, but I like the premise.


Danny Scott The Undisputed King of Selston


John Murray, 5th, HB, £16.99, 9781399816793


Scott grew up in the Nottinghamshire coal mining village of Selston in the 1970s. This evocative memoir is also a portrait of a “hard place, inhabited by hard people with hard lives”, somewhere where coal would always be king. Until it wasn’t, and he had to contemplate a life elsewhere, bucking the trend of five generations of miners.


Athena Stevens What’s Done Cannot Be Undone


HQ, 5th, HB, £18.99, 9780008557300


“This is a memoir about the forces that impact our lives, both good and bad”. Stevens has never learned the name of the doctor whose lack of


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