Biography
The girl from Tennessee
Dolly Parton is the living embodiment of America’s best values, says Philip Hensher
Private passions of a public moralist
Ruth Scurr reveals what an impulsive, life-loving individual Mary Wollstonecraft was
His own best creation
Cary Grant was a hoax so sublime his creator struggled to escape him. He was a metaphor, too, for the…
The making of a composer
‘My dear young man: don’t take it too hard,’ Joseph II counsels a puppyish Mozart, the colour of his hair…
Poacher turned gamekeeper
A common but flawed assumption about Joseph Ratzinger is that he is simply an ardent conservative. That’s the figure we…
A great Liberal imperialist
This meaty but easily digested biography pivots around the events either side of that fateful evening of 4 August 1914…
High life
New York I received a letter from a long-time Spectatorreader, James Hackett, enquiring about books I am reading. It is…
Man of mystic sorrow
John Steinbeck didn’t believe in God — but he didn’t believe much in humanity either. When push came to shove,…
Four disparate thinkers
How do you write a group biography of people who never actually formed a group? Such is the challenge Wolfram…
Love gone wrong
Do you think your mother slept with T.S. Eliot? That was the question I needed to ask the 98-year-old in…
Everest or bust
Reinhold Messner, the first person to climb all 14 of the planet’s peaks higher than 8,000 metres, is probably the…
Restless spirit
Sybille Bedford died in 2006, just short of 95. She left four novels, a travel book, two volumes of legal…
Battered old bear
The Prime Minister may have lost his bounce –but perhaps that’s no bad thing, says Lynn Barber
The gospel of separation
In late April 1962 Los Angeles police shot and killed an unarmed black man, Ronald X Stokes, during a disturbance…
Three Girl Fridays
From Downing Street to Pennsylvania Avenue, history’s powerful inter-family influencers, whether spouses or children, have long operated behind weighty political…
It wasn’t all laughs
Even if you didn’t have an Auntie Dot in Cockermouth (the one who ate a raffia drinks coaster, mistaking it…
On a knife-edge with Stanley
Twenty-five years after making Spartacus, a parable of Roman decadence and rebellious slaves shot in California, Stanley Kubrick made Full…
An ‘unremarkable’ Nazi
In October 2011 Daniel Lee was at a dinner party at which a Dutch woman told a disturbing story. It…
A cat for Kit
Jeoffry is, by now, one of the best-known cats in literary history. And unlike the Cheshire Cat, Mr Mistoffelees, Orlando,…
Things go flying
There are fashions in the paranormal as in everything else. Since the famous Enfield hauntings of the late 1970s, poltergeists…
A playwright at play
Tom Stoppard is a non-stop genius of jokes – but many of them make his latest biographer uneasy, says Craig Raine
A rising star
It’s easy to forget that John F. Kennedy lived such a short life. At 43, he was the second youngest…
Epic of gossip
Staying with Peregrine Eliot (later 10th Earl of St Germans) at Port Eliot in Cornwall, Lucian Freud remembered that the…
The man who hunted himself
Graham Greene was constantly searching for peace of mind along with escapist thrills, says Nicholas Shakespeare
Never a dull sentence
Is Boris Johnson a fan of Harry Perry Robinson? If he isn’t, he really ought to be. Reading this absorbing…
