Biography & memoir

exploration of his relationship with his own body, ‘in decline and decay.’

In the Sunday Times, Peter Kemp was also full of praise: ‘wit, zest and a keen relish for the ridiculous predominate in Frayn’s pleasurable backwards look at what has been (as tour operators say) “the journey of a lifetime”.’ And Libby Purves, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, paid tribute to a writer ‘amused without malice, eager to love.’ Each essay in the collection, she wrote, is so ‘sharply drawn’ that readers should read one at a time, ‘then go for a short walk to think about it.’ late civil servant Sir Jeremy Heywood. Freedom in order. Interviewed by Louise Carpenter of the Daily Telegraph, she said: ‘…. the choice of voyage was incredibly dangerous with such small children and no real provision to look after us. We were stateless and invisible.’

Johnson At Ten

Anthony Seldon And Raymond Newell

Atlantic, 624pp, £25 you consider the names Worth, Poiret, Chanel, Dior, Quant, Saint Laurent and Westwood, countless images of their transformative apparel rise up in the mind. With the name Karl Lagerfeld there is only one image, the grotesque costume he adopted in later life. His career made no mark on fashion itself, only on the fashion business.’ This was entirely appropriate for a man who ‘often said that he hadn’t the slightest concern for posterity and was interested in living for the moment’.

Among Others Michael Frayn

Faber, 272pp, £25

Now approaching 90, the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn is still working but is also one of the last survivors of a mid-20th century world of letters now almost completely vanished. His recent collection of short essays, becomes, mused Tim Adams in the Guardian, ‘a thoughtful and often moving portrait of a disappearing world in which a generous kind of bookish rigour and worldly wit created fleeting incandescence at the heart of British cultural life.’

In the Telegraph, Ian Sansom tried to pin Frayn down. ‘The thinking man’s Alan Bennett? A less cleverdick Tom Stoppard? Ayckbourn without quite so many laughs? Intelligent without insisting on his intelligence, witty without too much trying-to-please, ingenious yet sedulous, Michael Frayn is the ideal of the old-fashioned man of letters.’

Sansom admired the ‘clear-eyed serenity’ of Frayn’s late style which includes an amusing, insightful

Wavewalker Breaking Free Suzanne Heywood

William Collins, 416pp, £20 Imagine your parents taking you out of school to sail the oceans of the world. Sounds blissful? Reviewers of Suzanne Heywood’s memoir found it a useful corrective to any mistaken dreams of freedom on the high seas. Heywood’s father Gordon took his wife and two small children off to sea in a schooner 1976 and they didn’t return for a decade. ‘I can’t think of a better education that sailing around the world,’ he told them. His daughter has a different story.

In the Times, Hadley Freeman observed that the book describes ‘an unforgettable kind of parental negligence.’ Freeman thought that Heywood’s accounts of her parents’ monstrousness were somewhat one-sided, ‘like reading a teenager’s diary’ but in the Daily Mail, Ysenda Maxtone Graham listed the ordeals.

‘If the reign of Bad King Boris looked dreadful from the outside, it was even more diabolical viewed from the inside,’ said the Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley after reading what he called ‘an authoritative, gripping and often jaw-dropping account of the bedlam’ in Boris Johnson’s Downing Street.

Daniel Finkelstein, writing in the Times, agreed: ‘ Even those already pretty sceptical about Johnson will find this book eye opening. Johnson was incapable of taking a decision, failed to read his papers, often ignored the detail and would tell whoever was with him whatever they wanted to hear’. He also had bad points.

Gaby Hinsliff, in the Guardian, found room to enter a note of regret that the authors’ high-mindedness – they are more interested in failures of policymaking than gossip and scandal – means ‘the book’s weakness is that its charges of chaotic vacuousness are not new, while the sheer flimsiness of Johnson’s programme provides such heavyweight authors with too little to get their teeth into; the overall effect is rather like sending distinguished theatre critics to cover a school nativity play’.

‘Stuck on a coral reef; stuck in “the doldrums”, mid-Atlantic; stuck mid-ocean with a flat battery and a broken engine; stuck in a cyclone, stuck on various tropical or volcanic islands for months while her cashstrapped parents desperately tried to make money. Running out of drinking water; living on tinned corned beef.’

Against the odds, Heywood finally got to Oxford and then married the

Less enthusiastic was Robert Harris in the Sunday Times, who noted that the more than 200 interviews the authors conducted ‘add[ed] much useful detail’, but added ‘unfortunately that is the most that can be said for the book.

‘For nearly 20 years,’ he said, ‘Anthony Seldon, a leading public school headmaster, has produced a series of magisterial end-of-term reports on recent prime ministers’, and ‘finds pupil Johnson an affront to the traditions of the school, rather as if Flashman had been appointed head boy’.