Book review – biography
‘What will they do when I am gone?’
Edward Thomas was gloomy as Eeyore. In 1906 he complained to a friend that his writing ‘was suffering more &…
Micro-managing the terror
‘Lately, the paradoxical turns of recent Russian history… have given my research more than scholarly relevance,’ remarks Oleg Khlevniuk in…
Demonised Barber of Fleet Street
We know a great deal about Samuel Johnson and virtually nothing about his Jamaican servant, Francis Barber. The few facts…
All the men and women merely players
How many books are there about Shakespeare? A study published in the 1970s claimed a figure of 11,000, and today…
The devil’s devoted disciple
It is ironic that this weighty biography of Hitler’s evil genius of a propaganda minister is published on the day…
A passion for men and intrigue
Moura Budberg (1892–1974) had an extraordinary life. She was born in the Poltava region of Ukraine, and as a young…
The raw material of fiction
Saul Bellow’s lurid personal life — especially the triangular relationship with his wife and her lover — was the basis for his best work, says Craig Raine
All things to all men
What did St George do? Killed a dragon, as everyone knows. And yet, as Samantha Riches points out, no mention…
Passionate pioneers
If Mary Wollstonecraft, as she once declared, ‘was not born to tred in the beaten track’, the same with even…
Fighting fear with fear
‘Do it with scissors’ was Alfred Hitchcock’s advice for prospective murderers, though a glance at these two biographies reminds us…
Some watcher of the skies
We live in an age of astronomical marvels. Last year Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft made a daring rendezvous with the comet…
Daring to be a Daniel
As I swink in the field of Thatcher studies, this book brings refreshment. It is a welcome and rare. Far…
Thank heaven for little girls
A.S. Byatt explores the dark alternatives to innocence in Lewis Carroll’s deeply disturbing looking-glass world
Public man, lover, connoisseur
To the 21st-century right, especially in the United States, John Maynard Keynes has become a much-hated figure whose name is…
Waterloo sunset years
As Johnny Rogan notes in this new biography of Ray Davies and the Kinks, it is almost 50 years since…
A Stoic among sadists
They lived in barrels, they camped on top of columns, or in caves: the lives of the sages are often…
Three men in the Basin
John Hemming is our greatest living scholar-explorer. He is best known for his extraordinary first book The Conquest of the…
A lone Crusader declares holy war
In 2011, Anders Breivik murdered 69 teenagers in a socialist summer camp outside the Norwegian capital of Oslo, and eight…
Rescuing the past from the teeth of time
John Aubrey investigated everything from the workings of the brain, the causation of winds and the origins of Stonehenge to…
Fame and scandal in the family
The first Marquess of Dufferin and Ava is largely forgotten today — rotten luck for the great diplomat of the…
Futurist at a dead end
Why increase the number of suicides? Better to increase the output of ink! wrote Vladimir Mayakovsky in 1926 in response…
The making of a famous serious poet
T.S. Eliot may have put much of his early life into his poetry, says Daniel Swift, but The Waste Land remains a marvellous mystery that defies explanation
It was beauty killed the beast
At the time of his death in 1932 Edgar Wallace had published some 200 books, 25 plays, 45 collections of…
Building Jerusalem in Bow
This is the tale of Muriel Lester, once famous pacifist and social reformer, and Nellie Dowell, her invisible friend. Nellie…
A master of plein-airism
‘If I see something I like I wish to tell someone else; this… is why I paint.’ Patrick George is…
