I am actually going to interpret this a bit more widely than just biographies to include other personal accounts. A really great place to start is with The Assassin's Cloak: An Anthology of the World's Greatest Diarists
, which as the title suggests takes the reader through a range of people’s diaries. It is not only a good read in itself, but might well also provide lots of inspiration for other books to read. This might include a book such as The Kenneth Williams Diaries
, which is a rather candid account of about 40 years of his life.A lot of popular biographies are celebrity related – and there is nothing wrong with that – but there are also a lot of biographies and personal accounts that stand in their own right and sometimes get forgotten. There is the excellent and prizewinning The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance
or the moving account of the kidnap of Judith Tebbutt in A Long Walk Home: One Woman's Story of Kidnap, Hostage, Loss - and Survival
.A book very much of the moment is Lynda Bellingham’s There's Something I've Been Dying to Tell You
, which was written following her cancer diagnosis – made all the more pertinent due to her recent death. If you are looking for something a little lighter then Graham Norton’s The Life and Loves of a He Devil: A Memoir
or Rebecca Front’s Curious: True Stories and Loose Connections
. Or even Charlotte Green’s The News Is Read
if you are a fan of the (former) Radio 4 presenter.You could also try a British ‘institution’ such as David Attenborough’s Life on Air
or Judi Dench
(a description that I am sure she would hate!).All the books listed above, plus a few more are below:
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