MUST READS

THE VANITY FAIR DIARIES by Tina Brown THE VANITY FAIR DIARIES by Tina Brown In 2015, Tina Brown began browsing the journals she had kept during the heady years from 1983-1992 when she was editing Vanity Fair magazine in New York. Her intention was to write a book about the Crazy Eighties: ‘But the more I read, the more I realised I had already written one.’ Brown’s job placed her at the centre of the glamour and hedonism of Manhattan during the Reagan era, and she views this world with the beady eye of someone who is neither insider nor outsider, but both at the same time. DOCTOR YOU by Jeremy Howick DOCTOR YOU by Jeremy Howick A clinical epidemiologist, writes Jeremy Howick, ‘is a geek word for someone who uses statistics to find out if treatments work’. OUTSIDERS by Lyndall Gordon OUTSIDERS by Lyndall Gordon In Outsiders, prize-winning biographer Lyndall Gordon brings together the lives of five novelists — Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner and Virginia Woolf — and examines how their outsider status influenced their writing. Bronte’s genius flourished in the harsh Yorkshire moors; a turbulent emotional life inspired Schreiner’s radical idealism; and Woolf married Leonard, a supportive fellow writer.