Biography
Death in Rome
On Sunday 17 September 1820, John Keats and his travelling companion, the young painter Joseph Severn, set sail for Italy,…
Who’s pursuing a vendetta?
Lord help me I love a hatchet job, and you’ll have to too if you want to make it through…
The indispensable impresario
‘What exactly is it you do?’ asked a bamboozled King Alfonso XIII of Spain upon meeting Sergei Diaghilev at a…
Man of vision
‘Our generation owes an apology to the shades of Harold Wilson,’ the polling guru Peter Kellner once told me. Had…
Under a bad moon
Million-selling rock bands are rarely happy families. They are an uneasy combination of a creative alliance and a business partnership,…
How far could he go?
I have never had much time for Aleister Crowley. Magic(k) is nonsense; the mystical societies he founded were simply pretexts…
The best of the bunch
It’s hard (if not impossible) to imagine a world worth living in that doesn’t include the Marx Brothers; and equally…
A sentimental journey
Publishers lately seem to have got the idea that otherwise uncommercial subjects might be rendered sexy if presented with a…
The French scapegoat
On 15 June 1645, as Thomas Fairfax’s soldiers picked over the scattered debris on the Naseby battlefield, they made a…
The essence of bohemian Paris
This book is about two people who reinvented themselves in 1920s Paris. Mark Braude focuses on Kiki de Montparnasse and…
A very Irish tragedy
Until very recently, political assassination was a mercifully uncommon occurrence in British politics, though that has changed. Previously when such…
A courtroom giant
Sydney Kentridge, the protagonist of Thomas Grant’s superb legal saga The Mandela Brief, is that trickiest of biographical subjects: a…
Alfred the Great
Andrew Lycett on the pugnacious British press baron dedicated to fighting the first world war through newsprint
The wild, wide fen
‘To talk about Crabbe is to talk about England,’ E.M. Forster declared in a radio broadcast in May 1941, but…
Battered but unbowed
Don’t bring a bottle. Your chances of finding a party in full swing down those chilly corridors are close to…
Will the world forsake him?
Cracks are beginning to appear in T.S. Eliot’s once unassailable reputation, says Philip Hensher
Ballet’s lonely pioneer
Bronislava Nijinska was constantly undermined in her lifetime – most cruelly by her brother, says Sarah Crompton
No time-wasters, please
Apparently Anna Wintour wants to be seen as human, and Amy Odell’s biography goes some way to helping her achieve…
A dangerous balancing act
Thomas Cromwell’s biographer Diarmaid MacCulloch once told me that my father’s family, the Dormers, had been servants of the great…
A prickly customer
In October 1897, the grandees of the Royal Horticultural Society gathered to bestow their highest award, the Victoria Medal of…
A true bohemian
Jean Rhys lived a vagabond life – but she wrote about gloom and squalor with luminous purity and a poet’s care, says Lucasta Miller
The man in the white suit
Mark Twain conquered almost every challenge that came his way except old age. Living well into his seventies, he was…
Heights of absurdity
The invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces has rendered what might otherwise have seemed a fairly niche study of a…
Surreal love triangle
One could compile a fat anthology of tributes to Marcel Duchamp’s charm – especially what one friend called the artist’s…
Muse and monster
Nancy Cunard’s defiance of convention began early, fuelled by bitter resentment towards her mother, says Jane Ridley
