Biography
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…
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,…
