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Newest Autobiography Reviews (view source)

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[[Category:Autobiography|*]]

[[Category:New Reviews|Autobiography]] __NOTOC__

{{newreview

|author=Rick Stein

|title=Under a Mackerel Sky

|rating=4

|genre=Autobiography

|summary=Rick Stein was born if not to wealth then certainly to privilege. He was raised on an Oxfordshire farm and spent holidays at the family's home in Cornwall. His parents were gregarious and intelligent and he was one of five children who led the sort of open-air life that country children did in those days before we worried about stranger danger. He enjoyed school and loved Cornwall, where he gained a reputation as he got older for giving riotous parties in a barn on the Cornish property. It was idyllic - until the day that his father (who was bi-polar) committed suicide. Stein's reaction to this was to head to the Australian outback where he worked in a variety of jobs (some more palatable than others) and finally came back to England, via America and Mexico.

|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0091949912</amazonuk>

}}

{{newreview

|title=Me After You

|summary=Now aged 80, Penelope Lively, the Booker Prize-winning author of twenty works of fiction including ''Moon Tiger'' (1987) and ''How It All Began'' (2011), is increasingly conscious of death approaching. It may be true that, as concluded in [[Nothing to be Frightened of by Julian Barnes]], 'we cannot truly savour life without a regular awareness of extinction', but this memoir is less a ''memento mori'' than an agreeably scattered tour through Lively's life and times.

|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241146380</amazonuk>

}}

~~{{newreview~~

~~|author=Tony Benn~~

~~|title=The Last Diaries: A Blaze of Autumn Sunshine~~

~~|rating=4~~

~~|genre=Autobiography~~

|summary=Throughout my life I've found that whilst I might not always agree with Tony Benn's politics, whatever he had to say would give me food for thought - and frequently changed the way that I viewed a situation. He's a wonderful mixture of supreme intelligence and humanity which is so rarely found - particularly in modern-day politics and it was with some misgivings that I opened this volume of his diaries, given that the slipcover speaks of the ''compensations and challenges of old age'' and ''the disadvantages of growing older, the loneliness of widowhood, the upheaval of moving from the family home of sixty years and the problems of failing health.'' I've always been relieved that Benn has never ''quite'' achieved the status of national treasure, but surely he couldn't be in decline?

~~|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0091943876</amazonuk>~~

}}

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