Biography
At home with the Bloomsberries
Above the range in the kitchen at Charleston House is a painted inscription: ‘Grace Higgens worked here for 50 years…
‘The most important Jewish writer since Kafka’
Ian Thomson on the turbulent life of Clarice Lispector
We were not amused
Princess Louise (1848–1939), Queen Victoria’s fourth daughter, was the prettiest and liveliest of the five princesses, and the only one…
Between tenderness and rage
In the autumn of 2012, Philip Roth told a French magazine that his latest book, Nemesis, would be his last.…
Aesthete and huckster
Sam Leith suspects that even such a distinguished connoisseur as Bernard Berenson did not always play a straight bat
The maiden aunt of modernism
Marianne Moore’s poems are notoriously ‘difficult’ but her personality and the circumstances of her life are as fascinating today as…
Fun and games at Glin
I have to declare an interest: for many years the Knight and I were the closest of friends until a…
Too many Cooks…
It’s no joke, writing about comedians. Their work is funny, their lives are not. Rightly honouring the former while accurately…
A touch of Frost
Is there any such thing as abstract art? Narratives and coherent harmonies seem to me always to emerge from the…
The Welsh Chekhov
Rhys Davies was a Welsh writer in English who lived most of his life in London, that Tir na nÓg…
Winning through
‘Experiences aren’t given us to be “got over”, otherwise they would hardly be experiences.’ The opening sentence of the first…
Neither saint nor sage
The inventor of ‘doublethink’ was consistently inconsistent in his own political views, says A.N. Wilson. And no fun at all
Sheer genius
What, one wonders, will John Eliot Gardiner be chiefly remembered for? Perhaps, by many who have worked with him, for…
Black and beyond
When Prince Albert died in 1861, aged 42, Queen Victoria, after briefly losing the use of her legs, ordered that…
Grand old master of modernism
How minor is minor? ‘Rings a bell’ was more or less the response of two English literature graduates, now successful…
Lovely, enchanting language
When John Drury, himself an Anglican divine, told James Fenton (the son of a canon of Christ Church) that he…
Master of suspense
In the outrageous 2010 press hounding of the innocent schoolteacher Christopher Jefferies over the murder of his young female tenant…
The hero of Burma
Given the outcome of recent military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is pertinent to look for one particular quality…
National hero
Philip Ziegler is best known for his biographies, often official, of politicians, royalty and soldiers. They include Harold Wilson, Edward…
Indecent exposure
This biography has somewhat more news value than most literary biographies. Its subject worked hard to ensure that. After 1965,…
Here comes everybody
This is an unusual book: a Spanish historian writes the life of an English historian of Spain. In doing so,…
Riding for Rwanda
This is a book about Rwanda. It’s a book about cycling. But it’s not, in the end, a book about…
