Robert Hughes' autobiography

Two of Australia's grand old men of letters have new offerings. Things I Didn't Know is the truculent autobiography of veteran art critic Robert Hughes. A man who has lived life very keenly indeed, Hughes reminisces about his Jesuit education, his trio of catastrophic marriages and his hectic career which culminated with the publication of The Shock of the New, Hughes' landmark treatise on modern painting.

He also writes about his tendency to suffer apocalyptic periods of depression, one of which, in 1999, saw Hughes almost literally drive himself to destruction. North Face of Soho, Clive James' fourth volume of autobiography, still finds our man a lowly undergraduate in 1960s Cambridge preparing to invade Grub Street. Book Notes looks forward to volume 1969 in which James will recall how he made a living out of appearing on chat shows too cheap to pay for Peter Ustinov. The 118th volume will then chart his time spent squinting smugly through his own shows which were exactly the kind of turgid trivia he had crucified while television critic for the Observer. James calls these his Unreliable Memoirs. Immaterial Memoirs would be more accurate.