Book review – biography
Ménage à quatre with Robert Graves
‘I have a very poor opinion of other people’s opinion of me — though I am fairly happy in my…
Anita Leslie: sparkling socialite with the Croix de Guerre
Anita Leslie knew how to tell a story. Arranging to sit for a portrait six months before she died, she…
Bruce Lee: weird, gruesome and oh-so-cool
Every cinema-loving person has a favourite Bruce Lee moment. My own comes towards the end of Enter the Dragon, the…
![Mandela revisits his prison cell on Robben Island in 1994 [Getty]](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/mandela.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
What Nelson Mandela really craved in prison: Pond’s Cold Cream
So much rubbish has been written over the years by those who feared, revered or pretended to know Nelson Mandela…
You didn’t have to be mad to work for Tommy Nutter — but it helped
The tailor’s art is a triumph of mind over schmatte. Not just in the physical cutting and stitching, but in…
The sound of silence that echoes round Paul Simon
Someone has gone to a lot of trouble choosing the jacket cover of Robert Hilburn’s authorised biography of Paul Simon…
America’s wittiest women fight to be taken seriously
From Aphra Behn to Virginia Woolf, women who make a living by their pens have frequently felt the need to…
The young Descartes: I fought, therefore I thought
Descartes is most generally known these days for being the guy who was sure he existed because he was thinking.…
Kitty Marion: too radical even for the suffragettes
The suffragettes are largely remembered not as firestarters and bombers but as pale martyrs to patriarchy. The hunger artists refusing…
There’s much of Astrid Lindgren in the carrot-haired rebel Pippi Longstocking
Pippi Longstocking is a nine-year-old girl who lives alone with a monkey and horse in a cottage called Villa Villekulla…
Henry Miller — pornographer or prophet?
Few writers seem less deserving of resuscitation than Henry Miller. When the Scottish poet and novelist John Burnside was asked…
How one man took on the French betting system — and kept winning against the odds
About a third of the way through this book I worked out that I had an unbeatable system for winning…
From persecutor to preacher: the journey of St Paul
Saint Paul is unique among those who have changed the course of history — responsible not just for one but…
Was Ada Lovelace the true founder of Silicon Valley?
It’s more than 160 years since the death of the computer pioneer Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage’s ‘enchantress of numbers’ and…
Thomas Paine: spendthrift, scrounger and polemicist of genius
‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again.’ Ronald Reagan made this most unconservative of lines…
Doris Lessing: from champion of free love to frump with a bun
‘I am interested only in stretching myself, in living as fully as I can.’ Lara Feigel begins her thoughtful book…
How a 14th-century Arab thinker influenced Ronald Reagan’s fiscal policy
At a press conference in October 1981, Ronald Reagan quoted Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) in support of what is known…
Richard Jefferies: a naturalist under the microscope
Alan Bennett once defined a classic as ‘a book everyone is assumed to have read and forgets if they have…
The Cambridge spy ring and the myth of an upper-class cover up
It has become fashionable since the fall of the Soviet Union to diagnose communist fellow travelling as a form of…
Enrico Fermi: nuclear physicist and childish practical joker
Enrico Fermi may not be a name as familiar as Einstein, Feynman or Hawking, but he was one of the…
How Raffles stole the jewel of Singapore
Accounts of the founding of the British Empire once echoed the pages of Boy’s Own, featuring visionaries, armed with a…
Mary Shelley’s monstrous creation close up
There are few more seductive figures for biographers than Mary Shelley. The daughter of the radical philosopher and novelist William…
Sex and sycophancy at Rolling Stone
Many moons ago, I worked at the New Musical Express magazine, which transformed me from virgin schoolgirl to the fabulous…
Ted Lewis: the great British crime writer you’ve never heard of
If you search Google Images for Ted Lewis, the results show an American jazz-age band-leader in a battered top hat,…
Romance and rejection
‘Outsider’ ought to be an important word. To attach it to someone, particularly a writer, is to suggest that their…
