Biography
When the going was good
Though she photographed many society figures of the 1930s, Ker-Seymer lacked ambition and remains largely unknown – as she herself seems to have wanted
A skilled networker
Born in 1559, Alice Spencer, a formidable networker, matchmaker and patron of the arts, was the muse of poets including Edmund Spenser and John Milton
Disappointed youth
The singer-songwriter deserved to be far better known in his lifetime – but reticence and mental illness contributed to his tragically early death in 1974
The British Socrates
After vital work for British intelligence during the second world war, why did J.L. Austin devote the rest of his life to considering literally asinine questions?
Between woods and water
Patrick Barkham pays tribute to the much-missed nature writer, whose core response to the call of the wild animated everything he did
Three’s a crowd
Calling themselves the Bee Gees spelt trouble from the start for the very disparate Gibb brothers, says Craig Brown
A mass of contradictions
D.J. Taylor explores how the fracture between the person Orwell wanted to be and the person he seemed to be runs through his life and work
Discordant times
Exiled from Russia and often denigrated in America, Rachmaninoff lived in a fug of unbearable, impenetrable sadness, says Paul Kildea
From she-devil to heroine
Jonny Steinberg describes Nelson and Winnie’s doomed marriage, and how their posthumous reputations have undergone a startling reversal
The great exhibitionist
Antonia Fraser describes an intelligent, independent woman, whose penchant for cross-dressing reflected her yearning for the freedom only men enjoyed
A lifetime’s passion
Honor Clerk celebrates Jim Ede and his matchless collection at Kettle’s Yard
No more Mr Nice Guy
Volodymyr Zelensky is one of the few leaders of modern times whose charisma, determination and sheer cojones can be said,…
We love you, Uncle Xi!
Tom Miller on the cult of personality that China’s ‘core leader’ has so ruthlessly constructed
Never the bride
Tom Williams describes how two women’s hopes of marrying T.S. Eliot came to nothing
‘A really complicated person’
Almost two years after the death of Jan Morris, the jaunty travel writer and pioneer of modern gender transition, her…
Dangerous myth-makers
Racism lies at the heart of the Victorian rewrite of the creation myth. What happened in prehistory, according to Thomas…
His own worst enemy
The Radetzky March must be one of the dozen greatest European novels – but its author was frighteningly unpleasant, says Philip Hensher
Grand old man of British music
Ralph Vaughan Williams’s towering position in our national life is now beyond dispute – and can only grow, says Simon Heffer
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…
