Biography
John Deakin: the perfect anti-hero of the tawdry Soho scene
The photographer never attempted to show anyone in a good light, making his portraits of Francis Bacon and other Soho habitués look like dress rehearsals for morgue shots
They felt they could achieve anything together: two brave women in war-torn Serbia
Vera Holme and Evelina Haverfield, lovers and fellow suffragettes, risked their lives as nursing staff in the first world war and exposed the absurdity of Edwardian homophobia
What we owe to the self-taught genius Carl Linnaeus
Bumptious, uncouth and the despair of his schoolmasters, Linnaeus died almost forgotten. Yet he established a system of taxonomy that we still use two centuries later
Sir Roger Casement never deserved to hang
Executed as one of the leaders of the Easter Rising, he was absent from Dublin at the time of the doomed insurrection – and actually tried to prevent it
How country living changed the lives of three remarkable women writers
Harriet Baker describes how Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann found new forms of peace and creativity away from the stifling capital
The stark horror of Barbara Comyns’s fiction was all too autobiographical
Comyns’s fans have long enjoyed the novels’ macabre details and black humour. Now Avril Horner reveals their disturbing sources
The lonely passions of Carson McCullers
McCullers’s acclaimed first novel, written when she was 23, drew her into the orbit of several female writers with whom she fell in love – but it was never reciprocated for long
The fresh, forceful voice of Frantz Fanon
The Marxist from Martinique became a rallying figure for anti-colonial movements across the world. But might he have revised his violent message had he lived longer?
The remarkable Princess Gulbadan, flower of the Mughal court
Emperor Babur’s beloved daughter – whose name means ‘body like a rose’ – speaks to us across the centuries in a cliffhanging account of royal life in Hindustan
Four months adrift in the Pacific: a couple’s extraordinary feat of endurance
When a freak occurrence wrecked the Baileys’ sloop 300 miles from the Galapagos, their chances of rescue were minimal – and one of them couldn’t even swim
Will Keir Starmer ever learn to loosen up?
The Labour leader comes across as compassionate and hard-working, but so ill at ease in front of the cameras that even his close friends fail to recognise him
Four dangerous visionary writers
Simon Ings examines the lives of Maxim Gorky, Maurice Barrès, Gabriele D’Annunzio and Ding Ling, whose propagandism helped shape – and misshape – the 20th century
The strangeness of Charles III
‘He can cry at a sunset’, says one courtier of the King. A bullied child and an intellectual among George Formby fans, Charles dreams of gardening and plants mazes
Hanif Kureishi – portrait of the artist as a young man
Descriptions of the gifted author tearing up the literary landscape of the late 20th century are deeply poignant when set alongside Kureishi’s recent despatches from hospital
Milton Friedman – economic visionary or scourge of the world?
Monetarism, with which his name is associated, has long defined economic policy. But what would Friedman have made of the banking collapse, so soon after his death in 2006?
The data-spew about Bob Dylan never ends
In his latest volume of biography, Clinton Heylin spares us no details about Dylan’s misogyny and cranky obsessions during his almighty midlife crisis
The force of nature that drove Claude Monet
A compulsion to paint en plein air would remain with the great Impressionist for life, as well as a questing need to find new ways to express what he saw and felt
‘We are stuck like chicken feathers to tar’: Elizabeth Taylor’s description of the fabled romance
The Burton-Taylor relationship was either one of the greatest love stories of all time or a suicide pact carried out in relentless slow motion
Keeping a mistress was essential to John le Carré’s success
The novelist himself admitted that his infidelities ‘produced a duality and tension that became a necessary drug for my writing’
Out of the shadows
Unlike his attention-seeking brother David Stirling, Bill was a careful planner, responsible for many successful intelligence-gathering operations behind enemy lines
Gentle genius
Dissatisfied with his unfinished epic, the dying Vergil called for his scrolls to be burned, but was fortunately overruled by the Emperor Augustus
Travels in Italy with the teenage Mozart
Jane Glover follows the rapturous Wolfgang around Venice, Bologna, Florence and Naples on three journeys that would change the young composer’s life
The astonishing truth about 007
The world would never be quite the same again after we first glimpsed the casino of Royale-les-Eaux at three in the morning, says Philip Hensher
An obituarist’s search for the soul
Snatches of memoir, poetry and observation from a writer whose main preoccupation is recording the lives of others
The horrors of the ‘Upskirt Decade’
Lynn Barber 25 November 2023 9:00 am
The century began as a monstrous time to be famous and female – epitomised by the Tulsa judge who, in 2006, seemed to rule that no woman had a right to privacy in public