AUTOBIOGRAPHIES - those which figure highest in my estimation among those I read among all 20th Century literature (apart from World War autobiographies - see here).

Some of the many autobiographial books I have read, some of the especially formative or inspiring in my case. I do not include here the autobiographies of famous WW2 fighter aces, which figure among the most exciting and amazing of exploits, which naturally inspired me as a young man and caused my choosing the R.A.F. when I had to do National Service.

Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes by R.L. Stevenson. His romantic camping journey through Languedoc an age ago before local life traditions were largely lost - what ease of observation! Also An Inland Voyage - his canoe journey through the canals and waterways of France.

Far Away and Long Ago by W.H. Hudson - London 1918. Beautiful times, a mystical childhood in turn-of-the-century Argentina, a lost world. Deep and moving.W.H. Hudson (Also see his novels like 'Green Mansions' (about the Amazon jungle) and 'A Shepherd's Life' - an iconic book about pre-war life in the Southern English contryside.

Son of Adam by Denis Foreman - 1990 André Deutsch Ltd. Growing up as a very precocious child in an aristocratic Scottish family in a Dumfries castle. Remarkable and humerous record of the natural and long-lost social environment and of the process of his turbulent self-liberation from strictly conformist religious parents. Out of the ordinary writing...

Arrow in the Blue, The Invisible Writing (+ Scum of the Earth). Among the most perceptive autiobiography written and what experiences! Unfortunately, I did not discover Arthur Koestler's wonderful autobiographical books from the early 50s until 1998! Koestler was a famous, spoke many languages fluently - a very gifted and innovative journalist before he became a communist. He was the only non-Russian journalist to be allowed to travel the length and breadth of the Soviet Union in the 1930s. What he saw was terrible, but then he rationalised it as necessary to the progress o the dictatorship of the proletariat and the elimination of all class differences. He suffered accordingly and was imprisoned in Spain, surviving tortures to reach England - at that time an oasis of peace and sanity in a mad European world. His jailors talked about such things as gardening, which astonished him! Then he liberated himself from ideology and became a prominent critic of communism and the USSR! Later he grew interested in parapsychology, because of an experience he had when at the end of his tether in the Spanish jail.

The Lost World of the Kalahari" ('58) Laurens van der Post. As close to mystical as anything that is not religious. Heart-moving. Also the follow-up about Bushmen, I re-read the very great 1958 classic in 1991: just as heart-moving and heartrending as it was 30 years ago. Deep! One of his very best books. The Heart of the Hunter" ('61) and the forerunner Venture to the Interior ('52). Most van der Post books are excellent. The Night of the New Moon ('70) is tremendous. Also Yet Being Someone Other ('82) and Walk with a White Bushman (conversations - one of the latest).All in Penguin, UK.

Hunger by Knut Hamsun ("Sult") made a lasting impression on me well before I first visited Norway. It is a dramatised version of his own time in Christiania while trying to become an author. After moving there I read virtually all his works and liked most of them. It conveys a sense of Oslo (then Christiania) which lingered strongly even in the 1960s. Oddly, I had a walk-on role in a Danish film 'Sult' in which Per Oscarsson starred as Hamsun. (See image here)

Dear Theo by Irving Stone - being the self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh through his letteres to his brother Theo. The lonely soul unburdens himself and shows us the stringent demands of life in his time, especially as a struggling artist. It surely leaves a deep but positive impression on anyone with a heart.

Father and Son (1907) by Edmund Gosse (autobiographical 'novel') A study in depth of growing up with a religiously-obsessed (Pentecostial) father. Very instructive.

The Flax of Dream - William Stephenson's semi-autobiographical triology, especially the beautiful. nostalgic and deeply perceptive descriptions of boyhood (in Dandelion Days)entranced me in my very early twenties.

Our Kate Catherine Cookson (Futura 1990) Autobiography. Growing up in Shields and hard times galore. My mother went to the same school, so we knew how authentic her own story was.

Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis was autobiography at its peak (and the moving film of it - Shadowlands - is too).

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts Though this is not directly autobiography, it is made into a most thrilling saga - most of it authentic events that happened to him. It has the hallmark to those of us who know India and have some knowledge of life at street level to be truly authentic. The dark side of India - darker than most can conceive - is also brought forth, but also the many good things about a people's spirit under some of the toughest circumstances in the world. Essential for one who wants to know how India, and Indian corruption and crime, work.

The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian by Nirad C. Chaudhuri. A tour de force of a book with some of the most compelling descriptions of life under the Raj (Sirkar) in Calcutta and Bengalese villages. The author was a polymath whose breadth of intellect and historical knowledge (and languages, esepcially European, including ancient Greek, Latin and French) was breahtaking. He explain the ins and outs of Indian thought and behaviour through the decline of British rule and afterards. He was the most penetrating exposer of Indian foibles and corruption, eventually moving to England after middle age and becoming an Honorary Ph.D at Oxford and and MBE. He live to 100 years of age. His books are all most insightful about India and human kind. The Continent of Circe woke me quite rudely from my somewhat romantic illusions about Indian life and times, and its varied and warring population. He was a prophet without honour in his own country - an unforgiving Hindu nation.

The Sun In The Morning. (London 1990 M.M. Kaye's autobiographical book on her growing up in India was good. First World War autobiographies: Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That was very good, but not as good as the 3 volumes of Memories of a Fox-Hunting Man by Trader Horn ('The Ivory Coast in the Earlies') by Alfred Aloysius Horn (1927 Jonathan Cape). Truly remarkable account by one of the earliest trader/discoverers of virgin Africa (in the 19th century). A great classic.

Karen Blixen's African Farm and its follow-up are excellent captures of a lost world of Africa almost untroubled by colonialism! Beryl Markham's autiobiography West With the Night is a gem of writing, and more vital than Blixen (she knew many of the same people & places too). Elspeth Huxley's African reminiscences are also brilliant.

A Postillion Struck by Lightning, Snakes and Ladders, An Orderly Man by Dirk Bogarde are fine autobiographical writings. Real insight into th film industry most lucidly and originally explained from tell-all peronal experience.

Crowdie and Cream Finlay J. Macdonald (Memoirs of a Hebridean childhood) Very evocative.

The Parish Lantern - Muddy Boots and Sunday Suits - A Lad of Evesham Vale - The Secrets of Bredon Hill - Golden Sheaves, Black Horses -and several more are all country nostalgia from the Evesham area by Fred Archer from his childhood and youth. He captures a lost world of rustic life, into which he grew up and re-discovered through his lucid and synpathetic writing. All in Futura Books.

The Last Barrier Reshad Feild. How he came onto the Sufi path. Mystical and well written, also practical, but essentially a book that is unrealistic about life and so can mislead one down a path of fruitless, unworldly 'spirituality'.

Meetings with Remarkable Men G.I. Gurdjieff (repub. London 1983) and, not least, C.S. Nott's "Teachings of Gurdjieff" (London 1961) - the best book about Gurdjieff. Fascinating, but highly likely to be largely bogus.

Living with the Himalayan Masters by Swami Rama, the biography of Swami Rama´s years of youth and young manhood, written down by Swami Ajaya. One of the most 'amazing' books on Indian spirituality with great intrest and charm (much of it literally unbelievable to those who have truly put themselves on the line to learn whether there could be any real substance in it). Besides, Swami Rama was a sexual abuser, as has been testified by some of his victims!).

Flight to Arras and Wind, Sand and Stars. (Both excellent books on his flying exploits) by Antoine St. Exupery.

The Flying Carpet (like St. Exupery and even more full of incident) by Halliburton.