Biography
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…
His dark materials
In this giant, prodigiously sourced and insightful biography, John A. Farrell shows how Richard Milhous Nixon was the nightmare of…
Descent into hell
It’s awful, but the surname Rausing (once synonymous only with the Tetrapak fortune) now summons up a terrible stench in…
A feminist trailblazer
On the evening of 28 October 1908, two unremarkable middle-class women wearing heavy overcoats gained admission to the Ladies’ Gallery,…
The German Lion of Africa
What’s going on with book reviews? Here is the Pulitizer prizewinning (for ‘criticism’) Michael Dirda in the Washington Post, on…
A dazzling vision
There are a number of reports by his contemporaries of Thomas Gainsborough at work. They make you realise what a…
The morality of conducting
Now he is the greatest figure for me, in the world. [Toscanini is] the last proud, noble, unbending representative (with…
