Biography
Chiselled beauty
‘To see a world in a grain of sand’, to attain the mystical perception that Blake advocated, requires a concentrated,…
More grand projects
Not content with imposing his will on nations, Napoleon tried to subdue nature too, says David Crane
A natural sensualist
Charm is a weasel word; it can evoke the superficial and insincere, and engender suspicion and mistrust. But charm in…
Quite contrary
This timely book celebrates one of the most remarkable women of the 18th century. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was so…
Apostle of modernism
Clive Bell is the perennial supporting character in the biographies of the Bloomsbury group. The husband of Vanessa Bell, brother-in-law…
Less than angelic
Vicars, tea parties and village fetes were a far cry from Barbara Pym’s early enthusiasms, Philip Hensher reveals
The great adventuress
At the masquerade celebrating the end of the War of Austrian Succession no one could take their eyes off the…
The voice of a generation
Bob Dylan didn’t just assimilate the Great American Songbook – he vastly increased its size and variety, says Andrew Motion
Cat on hot bricks
The name ‘Carré’ immediately evokes the shadowy world of espionage. Ironically, however, few people today have heard of the real…
Five intrepid women
I was first sent a version of Undreamed Shores: The Hidden Heroines of British Anthropology in June last year. I…
Stark, intense honesty
Philip Roth was prepared to stare the soul resolutely in the face – and for that he can be forgiven most things, says David Baddiel
Celebrity gangster
Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel was about as meta-gangsterish as a real life gangster could get. Born in the slums of Manhattan’s…
Crying in the wilderness
Even Edward Said would not have claimed to be ‘the 20th century’s most celebrated intellectual’. But neither was he ‘Professor of Terror’, says Justin Marozzi
The last of old England
Thomas Hennell is one of that generation of painters born in 1903 whose collective achievements are such an adornment of…
Jolly good company
In the spring of 1945 three men pooled their resources in order to buy Long Crichel House, a former rectory…
And then there were three
Lara Feigel tells of the passion, pain and sexual exploitation involved in Elizabeth Bowen’s affair with a young married scholar
Missing the big picture
In 1953, Francis Bacon’s friends Lucian Freud and Caroline Blackwood were concerned about the painter’s health. His liver was in…
Reinventing the superhero
If Marvel characters seem dysfunctional, just look at their creators, says Dorian Lynskey
A thoroughly modern Romantic
Keats is a much stranger poet than we tend to realise – who shocked his first readers by his vulgarity and gross indecency, says Philip Hensher
No regrets
Kim Philby once remarked to the journalist Murray Sayle that ‘to betray, you must first belong. I never belonged’. Kim,…
Rich man, bankrupt, thief
‘Everyone’s heard of Ghislaine Maxwell,’ says the blurb for Power: The Maxwells, a podcast series launched last month. ‘But there’s…
Escape into reality
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an ambitious, passionate, determined woman – not the sad-eyed invalid of legend, says Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
A burnt-out case
Those who best remember Dr Anthony Clare (1942-2007) for his broadcasting are firmly reminded by this biography that we didn’t…
The art of the steal
Making one’s fortune in Occupied Paris was largely a matter of knowing the right people: in fact, the further to…
Dark and twisted
Patricia Highsmith’s life was filled with more eccentric, disturbing brilliance than most readers can normally handle; and so the chief…
