Three exquisitely written British memoirs:
Half an Arch by Jonathan Glathorne-Hardy
"This is the best, certainly the most open, book ever written about fallen gentlefolk."
http://books.google.com/books?id=Bx7W-uJ...lLS-KgymPQ-N160
Jackdaw Cake by Norman Lewis
"I was nine years of age, and the adults peopling my world seemed on the whole irrational, but it was an irrationality I had come to accept as the norm. My mother had brought me to this vast house and told me, without discussion, preparation or warning, that I was to live among these strangers—for whom I was to show respect, even love—for an unspecified period of time. The prospect troubled me, but like an Arab child resigned in his religion, I soon learned to accept this new twist in the direction of my life, and the sounds of incessant laughter and grief soon lost all significance, became commonplace and thus passed without notice.
My mother, bastion of wisdom and fountainhead of truth in my universe, had gone, her flexible maternal authority replaced by the disciplines of my fire-scarred Aunt Polly, an epileptic who had suffered at least one fit per day since the age of fourteen, in the course of which she had fallen once from a window, once into a river, and twice into a fire. Every day, usually in the afternoon, she staged an unconscious drama, when she rushed screaming from room to room, sometimes bloodied by a fall, and once leaving a menstrual splash on the highly polished floor. It was difficult to decide whether she liked or disliked me, because she extended a tyranny in small ways over all who had dealings with her."
http://www.granta.com/extracts/94
Not Entitled by Frank Kermode
"In this enchanting, episodic memoir, Kermode chronicles the unusual course of events that carried him from a parochial childhood on the Isle of Man to international recognition as a literary critic. A modest, at times dolefully confessional raconteur, Kermode elides most details about his marriages and children, focusing instead upon his own perpetual feelings of dislocation and his lack of "entitlement" to cultural and familial attainments. Raised in a world of tenements, gaslights and ancient prejudices, the sensitive Kermode joined the navy at the outset of WWII, serving as clerk to a series of "mad captains" (including two Sisyphian years in Iceland building a naval defense that was never completed). Kermode next drifted into graduate school, later teaching at Reading, Bristol and University College of London, eventually becoming King Edward VII Professor of English at Cambridge, a post he resigned during a much-publicized controversy over post-structuralism during the early 1980s. Kermode also details the flap over his editorship of the cultural journal Encounter, which he left on principle in 1967 when it was revealed to be CIA-funded. And, through a marvelous prism of literary and cultural observations, Kermode, whose most famous book is The Sense of an Ending, affectingly ponders his own sense of mortality."
http://books.google.com/books?id=eo19AAA...JDaSSoQKyl7nSBw