Book review: Mom & Me & Mom, by Maya Angelou

There is violence in Maya Angelou's new book. There is also sorrow and bitterness and pain. But mainly there is love. Mom & Me & Mom is about a bond between mother and daughter that is slow to come, ferociously hard-won, very nearly lost, but, in the end, indestructible.
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Radio column: Overcoming prejudices

Until now, I've always had the World Service and Radio 4 down as the places to look for hard-hitting, politically challenging documentaries. You know the kind. The ones that can deposit you, still in your dressing gown and slippers, into the middle of a sub-Saharan war zone, or a Bolivian coke factory, and deliver a sharp punch to the guts any time your concentration might be in danger of drifting off.
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Radio column: Brand rolls with it

“I'm high as a kite,” declared Russell Brand breathlessly. “I've drunk a whole lot of caffeinated beverages to get me in the mood.”

I suspect the top brass at XFM – which has the distinction of being the first radio station to fire him after he read out pornography live on air – were in the market from something stronger to steady their nerves as Brand, alongside Noel Gallagher and a selection of guests, began a one-off, three-hour stint to raise money for the Teenage Cancer Trust.

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Radio column: What women want

On Sunday morning, I awoke to the sound of Clare Balding, she of horse-racing, memoir-writing, Olympics-presenting, Crufts-championing, quiz-show hosting, moorland-yomping and general switch-on-the-box-and-there-she-is-again fame.
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Devendra Banhart: 'I was singing as a woman when I was a child'

Devendra Banhart is having a cry. Not a huge one. One small tear and it's over. "I told you this would happen," he says, blinking. "Didn't I tell you?"

It's true, he did. An hour earlier, shortly after Banhart finished an interview with the radio presenter Lauren Laverne on BBC6 Music, during which his mind appeared to be elsewhere, he told me: "I find talking out loud, even to my friends, really difficult. And my friends would tell you that I will cry eventually. Not because I'm self-conscious. I know I'm an idiot and there's a liberating aspect to that. I just get teary at the most inopportune moments. It's like, because it's not really the time or place to be doing that, it just sort of happens."

Like farting?

"Exactly."

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Radio column: Bottling up

"What did you buy?" asked Victoria Derbyshire. 

"A bottle of gin," replied Rachel.

"And where did you drink it?"

"The first mouthful would have been in the toilet at Tesco... Then I went to a hotel."

"And drank the rest of the bottle?"

"I presume so, yes. I blacked out."

And so the cycle began again.

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Book Review: How Many Camels are There in Holland? By Phyllida Law

The title of the actress Phyllida Law's book refers to a question that dementia specialists put to their patients to help determine whether they have Alzheimer's. Law spent two years caring for her nonagenarian mother, Mego, in the tiny Scottish village of Ardentinny, with occasional help from friends, fellow villagers, and her daughter, the actresses Emma and Sophie Thompson.  Mego's memory was already failing when her husband Arthur died. She had been known to put her shoes in the oven and bacon in her sock drawer. Now she was brushing her teeth with shampoo and trying to exit a room via the window rather than the door. "Mother was lost," says Law.

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