Biography
The wildest Wilde of all: the scandalous life of Oscar’s father
‘To have a father is always big news,’ according to the narrator of Sebastian Barry’s early novel, The Engine of…
Vivien Leigh: the brilliant star that fast burned out
‘Dark Star’ is a suitable enough title in itself, but the definition makes it a brilliant one: ‘A Dark Star’,…
In praise of John Meade Falkner: poet, arms-dealer and unforgettable novelist
When H.H. Asquith, as prime minister, visited Elswick, Newcastle upon Tyne, during the first world war, he found a vast…
Edward Gorey: master of the macabre
‘A is for Amy who fell down the stairs/ B is for Basil, assaulted by bears…’ The Gashlycrumb Tinies, an…
Elizabeth II: Queen of tact and diplomacy
In her 66 years on the throne the Queen has represented Britain on official visits to at least 126 countries…
A real-life Bluebeard: on the track of France’s most notorious serial killer
From Colette to Rudyard Kipling, celebrities flocked for front-row seats at the 1921 trial of Henri Landru, the notorious ‘lonely…
Is Lionel Messi the greatest footballer of all time?
If you don’t know who Lionel Messi is you won’t enjoy this book much. If you do, you probably will.…
Saul Bellow: love the work, if not the man
Boxing writers sometimes try to make comparisons across weight groups. They used to say, for example, that Floyd Mayweather was…
Germaine Greer continues to shock and awe
There is an African bird called the ox-pecker with which Germaine Greer, conversant as she is with the natural world,…
Gandhi on Hitler: ‘I do not believe him to be as bad as he is portrayed’
‘It’s a beautiful world if it wasn’t for Gandhi who is really a perfect nuisance,’ Lord Willingdon, Viceroy of India,…
The old man and his muse: Hemingway’s toe-curling infatuation with Adriana Ivancich
One rainy evening in December 1948, a blue Buick emerged from the darkness of the Venetian lagoon near the village…
The unknown Auden: the poet’s dashing brother
A book that opens in a Lahore refugee camp, shifts to Cat Bells Fell, rising above the shores of Derwentwater,…
The new biography of Wilhelm Furtwängler is a real labour of loathing
The titans of the podium, a late 19th- and 20th-century phenomenon, a species now extinct, have on the whole been…
The electrifying genius of Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla, the man who made alternating current work, wrote to J. Pierpont Morgan, the industrialist and banker. It was…
The Wallis Simpson I knew – by Nicky Haslam
One would have thought this particular can of worms might, after nearly 80 years, be well past its sell-by date.…
The disappearing acts of Joseph Gray, master of military camouflage
On a night in Paris in 1914, Gertrude Stein was walking with Picasso when the first camouflaged trucks passed by.…
Biography is a thoroughly reprehensible genre
I saw a biopic about Morecambe and Wise recently. The actors impersonating the comedians were not a patch on the…
Debussy: the musical genius who erupted out of nowhere
At the end of his study of Debussy, Stephen Walsh makes the startling, but probably accurate, claim that musical revolutionaries…
What America needs is another Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt isn’t as popular as he once was. When Barack Obama won the 2008 election, he let it…
Taki: The truth about Ernest Hemingway
Gstaad When the snow finally stopped, the sublime, silent stars above made for dramatic viewing. Against silhouetted Alpine peaks, starry…
Bob Dylan is a modern-day Odysseus
‘There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.’…
Edward Garnett and his diligent blue pencil
Edward Garnett, radical, pacifist, freethinker, Russophile man of letters, was from the 1890s onwards for many years the pre-eminent fixer…
Gerry Adams: from jail to the Dail
When I recently asked a sardonic Northern Irish friend what historical figures Gerry Adams resembled, the tasteless reply came back:…
How pleasant to know Mr Lear
Edward Lear liked to tell the story of how he was once sitting in a railway carriage with two women…
Princess Uppity
Princess Margaret was everywhere on the bohemian scene of the 1960s and 1970s. She hung out with all the famous…
