Jeremy Lewis is remarkably self-deprecating, even by English standards. "As a child," he begins Grub Street Irregular, "I excelled at nothing, and little has changed since then." After listing some of his failings - cowardice, lack of artistic impulse, self-consciousness - he underscores his chronic ineptitude with a bathetic trumpeting of achievement: "I was, and remain, superhumanly flatulent, and adept at snarling farts that sent my sister, and later my [...]

Madresfield Court is an ancient and beautiful house in the blue remembered Malvern Hills. Evelyn Waugh first stayed there in 1931, broke and homeless after his divorce, and fell in love with the house and family - the Lygons. Waugh knew them through Hugh Lygon, for whom he had had a tendresse at Oxford, and who was charming, gay, drunk and doomed. Hugh had two brothers and four sisters, and [...]

Even before he was born, Ferdinand Mount knew absolutely everyone. "What an interesting and varied life I seem to have led in the womb," he reflects, "going to a bazaar with Unity Mitford, out on the razzle with Dylan Thomas and Philip Toynbee, possibly Burgess and Maclean, too."

His life as a journalist, novelist and political pundit has been equally interesting and varied, and, as the index of Cold Cream [...]

The solemn yet unreliable disclaimer that all characters are imaginary, and that any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental, still prefaces American novels, but in Britain and Europe, after a century or so of reassuring publishers and readers, discouraging potential litigants and prompting playful variants ("I am not I . . ."), the formula has lately been binned. It is absent from Ian McEwan's Atonement (2001), [...]

In life, as in his fiction, J G Ballard has always seen the skull beneath the skin. Among his first memories of Shanghai, where he was born in 1930, are the sight of council trucks collecting the corpses of the destitute who had died on the city's pavements and his discovery in a burial mound of a lidless coffin with a skeleton inside.

His father ran the China Printing and [...]