Book review – biography
Moving heaven and earth: Galileo’s subversive spyglass
We live in an age of astronomical marvels. Last year Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft made a daring rendezvous with the comet…
Did Mrs Thatcher ‘do’ God? Denis thought so, and he should know, says Charles Moore
As I swink in the field of Thatcher studies, this book brings refreshment. It is a welcome and rare. Far…
Stolen kisses and naked girls: there is much to wonder about in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland
A.S. Byatt explores the dark alternatives to innocence in Lewis Carroll’s deeply disturbing looking-glass world
John Maynard Keynes: transforming global economy while reading Virginia Woolf
To the 21st-century right, especially in the United States, John Maynard Keynes has become a much-hated figure whose name is…
Ray Davies: part of Swinging Sixties London — and apart from it too
As Johnny Rogan notes in this new biography of Ray Davies and the Kinks, it is almost 50 years since…
Men behaving badly: Nero, Claudius and even Seneca could be intensely cruel to women — and fish
They lived in barrels, they camped on top of columns, or in caves: the lives of the sages are often…
All in the name of science: three young naturalists go on an Amazonian killing-spree
John Hemming is our greatest living scholar-explorer. He is best known for his extraordinary first book The Conquest of the…
Anders Brievik: lonely computer-gamer on a killing spree
In 2011, Anders Breivik murdered 69 teenagers in a socialist summer camp outside the Norwegian capital of Oslo, and eight…
John Aubrey and his circle: those magnificent men and their flying machines
John Aubrey investigated everything from the workings of the brain, the causation of winds and the origins of Stonehenge to…
The first Lord Dufferin: the eclipse of a most eminent Victorian
The first Marquess of Dufferin and Ava is largely forgotten today — rotten luck for the great diplomat of the…
Both lyricist and agitator: the split personality of Vladimir Mayakovsky
Why increase the number of suicides? Better to increase the output of ink! wrote Vladimir Mayakovsky in 1926 in response…
Tom Eliot — a very practical cat. Did T.S. Eliot simply recycle every personal experience into poetry?
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
The King Kong of the thriller: the phenomenal output of Edgar Wallace, once the world’s most popular author
At the time of his death in 1932 Edgar Wallace had published some 200 books, 25 plays, 45 collections of…
Muriel and Nellie: two radical Christians build Jerusalem in London’s East End
This is the tale of Muriel Lester, once famous pacifist and social reformer, and Nellie Dowell, her invisible friend. Nellie…
Patrick George: painting some of his best work at 91
‘If I see something I like I wish to tell someone else; this… is why I paint.’ Patrick George is…
Wonder Woman: feminist symbol or the ultimate male fantasy?
It’s always interesting when people succeed in two different arenas — like Mike Nesmith’s mum, who gave the world both…
Hiding in Moominland: the conflicted life of Tove Jansson
Tove Jansson’s father was a sculptor specialising in war memorials to the heroes of the White Guard of the Finnish…
Eugene O’Neill: the dark genius of American theatre
Sarah Churchwell on how Eugene O’Neill virtually single-handedly revolutionised American theatre in the first half of the 20th century
Jerry Lee Lewis: interrogating ‘The Killer’
‘I ain’t never pretended to be anything,’ says the man they call the Killer. ‘I’ve lived my life to the…
Composer, conductor, author, pianist, lecturer — was there anything Leonard Bernstein couldn’t do?
On 17 May 1969 Leonard Bernstein ended his 12-year run as musical director of the New York Philharmonic with a…
Move over Downton: Margot and the Asquiths’ marital soap opera
You might be forgiven for thinking that there is no need for yet another book about Margot Asquith. Her War…
Sabina Spielrein: from psychiatric patient to psychoanalyst
Sabina Spielrein was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with groundbreaking ideas about the role of the reproductive drive in human psychology…
Did anyone ever really love Bob Hope?
Why does everything these days have to be a superlative? Why must writers scream for our attention, yelling that the…
Vita in her ivory tower: a portrait of a lonely, lovelorn aristocrat who yearned to be mistress of her own ancestral home
Visitors to the National Trust’s Sissinghurst — the decayed Elizabethan castle transformed by Vita Sackville-West in the early 1930s —…
What went so wrong for Vaclav Havel?
The unforgettable moment a quarter of a century ago when the Berlin Wall came down was the most vivid drama…
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