Biography
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…
Playing by his own rules
There’s a scene early on in A Song to Remember — Charles Vidor’s clunky Technicolor film of 1945 — in…
Love and courage
Philippe Sands on the heroic couple who defied Hitler and paid the ultimate price
Killing time
Keith Douglas is perhaps the best-known overlooked poet. He died following the D-Day landings in 1944, and his Collected Poems…
Sweetness and light
Who would imagine that Johann Zoffany’s celebrated 1780 depiction of the extensive Sharp family happily making music on their pleasure…
Wheels on fire
Formula One motor racing is the perennial, worldwide contest that most reliably gratifies hero-worshipping, power-worshipping, money-worshipping, technology-worshipping ghouls, and some…
The Mystery of Charles Dickens
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst explores the many rival identities of Charles Dickens
Tricks and treats
Give thanks to the person who invented Venetian blinds, they say, or it would be curtains for us all. Curtains…
