Book review – biography
Bound and caged, but fighting-fit
It’s always interesting when people succeed in two different arenas — like Mike Nesmith’s mum, who gave the world both…
Escape into Moomin world
Tove Jansson’s father was a sculptor specialising in war memorials to the heroes of the White Guard of the Finnish…
Bitter, dark and beautiful
Sarah Churchwell on how Eugene O’Neill virtually single-handedly revolutionised American theatre in the first half of the 20th century
The ‘Killer’ at large
‘I ain’t never pretended to be anything,’ says the man they call the Killer. ‘I’ve lived my life to the…
A multi-talented musician
On 17 May 1969 Leonard Bernstein ended his 12-year run as musical director of the New York Philharmonic with a…
Skirmishes on the home front
You might be forgiven for thinking that there is no need for yet another book about Margot Asquith. Her War…
From patient to doctor
Sabina Spielrein was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with groundbreaking ideas about the role of the reproductive drive in human psychology…
Forlorn Hope
Why does everything these days have to be a superlative? Why must writers scream for our attention, yelling that the…
Yearning for Knole
Visitors to the National Trust’s Sissinghurst — the decayed Elizabethan castle transformed by Vita Sackville-West in the early 1930s —…
Yesterday’s hero
The unforgettable moment a quarter of a century ago when the Berlin Wall came down was the most vivid drama…
Angry old woman
If Stalin had been a theatre director he’d have resembled Joan Littlewood. What an outstandingly unpleasant woman she was —…
Three was a crowd
Mirabel Cecil on Lord Berners’s volatile ménage — as surprising and colourful as his famous dyed doves
Daddy, we hardly knew you
The lefty hereditary peer has few equals as a figure of fun, in life or literature. The late Tony Benn…
Talking himself into madness
‘There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?/ They don’t make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,…
Beyond Endurance
Polar explorers are often cast as mavericks, and this is hardly surprising. The profession requires a disdain for pseudo-orthodoxies and,…
The seeds of Wisdom
The Lawrence books are piling up, aren’t they? I don’t mean the author of The Rainbow, though as I write…
Kissing cousins
Even ardent Mitfordians must quake at the sight of yet another biography of the sisterhood. There have been more forests…
A series of impressionist strokes
When she was four, Anne Sinclair had her portrait painted by Marie Laurencin. It is a charming picture, a little…
A Blanche Dubois of a book
Thomas W. Hodgkinson finds John Lahr’s ‘stand-alone’ biography of Tennessee Williams as confused and unbalanced as Streetcar’s heroine
England’s golden boy
Nothing illustrates the transformation in the working lives of professional footballers since the end of the maximum wage better than…
The bitter Snows of yesteryear
This book charts the rise and fall of one of the strangest power couples of modern times. The senior partner…
Our most popular (and hardworking) living artist
The first volume of Christopher Simon Sykes’s biography of David Hockney ended in the summer of 1975. The 38-year-old painter…
Flouting convention
Should one say ‘vicious circle’ or ‘vicious cycle’? That’s a question that just goes round and round inside my head.…
The paradigm of a poet
We needn’t apologise for Philip Larkin any longer, says Peter J. Conradi. His place is unmistakeably among the greats
Translating Proust wasn’t all
Sam Leith is astonished by how much the multi-talented Charles Scott Moncrieff achieved in his short lifetime
