Biography
The enduring charisma of Brazil’s working-class president
With his dedication to the labouring poor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is seen as both the humblest of politicians and his country’s saviour – perhaps even endowed with miraculous qualities
Bogart and Bacall’s first film together might as well have been called Carry On Flirting
Just a few months after the release of To Have and Have Not, with its sassy, sexy script, the film’s stars were married. But, as in many of Bogart’s films, romance also involved intrigue
A marriage of radical minds: the creative partnership of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson
Fanny’s influence on her husband’s work was considerable, perhaps especially in the fine late novellas, rich in ironies about imperialism and the exploitation of South Sea islanders
The crusading journalist who lectured on Shelley to coal miners
Loved and admired by fellow writers, Paul Foot was competitive, witty and exhilarating company – a friend of the friendless and a tireless campaigner for justice
Malice and intrigue in the shadow of Tom Tower
The eight Christ Church historians portrayed by Richard Davenport-Hines were supremely gifted as writers and talkers – but the unpleasantness of Oxford dons is not downplayed
‘I am haunted by waters’: Norman Maclean and his lyrical ‘little blue book’
The author of A River Runs Through It emerges as wiry, sardonic, compassionate and inspirational from Rebecca McCarthy’s trenchant memoir
Tall tales of the Golden East: the fabulous fabrications of two 20th-century con artists
Capitalising on his Afghan-Indian heritage, Ikbal Shah claimed to have crucial inside knowledge of Central Asia, while his son Idries later purveyed a rebranded Sufism for the West
Why Joni Mitchell sounded different from the start
Polio in childhood weakened her left hand, leaving her to devise alternative tuning, surprising phrasing and ‘chords of inquiry’ that hang like question marks in the air
The irrepressible musical gift of Huddie Ledbetter
Before his genius was widely recognised, the blues singer known as Lead Belly survived not only America’s most brutal prisons but cruel betrayal by his racist ‘manager’
Dedicated to debauchery: the life of Thom Gunn
Even the most liberal-minded reader might be surprised by the amount of crack cocaine, LSD, alcohol and casual sex the poet indulged over the course of 50 years
Paris is perhaps the greatest character in Balzac’s Human Comedy
The drama of the street is a constant theme, though Balzac himself took most pleasure in the city’s ‘gloomy passages and silent cul-de-sacs between midnight and two in the morning’
A long goodbye to Berlin
Christopher Isherwood’s experiences as a young man in Weimar Germany would be reworked in his autofiction for the rest of his life
The recklessness of George Mallory
Having quarrelled with his adept former fellow climber, Mallory attempted Everest in 1924 seriously ill-equipped, and taking an inexperienced 22-year-old with him instead
Agent Zo: the Polish blonde with nerves of steel
Clare Mulley celebrates the courage of Elzbieta Zawacka, who repeatedly risked her life in the second world war liaising between London and the Polish Resistance
Edwin Lutyens: the nation’s remembrancer-in-chief
Though much admired for his domestic architecture, Lutyens is perhaps most celebrated for Whitehall’s Cenotaph and the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme
The identical twins who captivated literary London
Intelligent and beautiful, Celia and Mamaine Paget were loved by some of the greatest writers of the interwar years, but remained uniquely devoted to each other
Alone and defenceless: the tragic death of Captain Cook
Striding ashore unarmed showed courage that bordered on recklessness. But it was a kind of theatre Cook relished on his travels - and, famously, it didn’t always work
Four female writers at the court of Elizabeth I
Of Ramie Targoff’s gifted quartet, Mary Sidney was particularly admired by her contemporaries for her translation of the Psalms into English verse
The circus provides perfect cover for espionage
As he flew his plane between circus acts across Germany in the 1930s, Cyril Bertram Mills gained vital aerial intelligence about the Nazis’ rearmament programme
John Deakin: the perfect anti-hero of the tawdry Soho scene
The photographer never attempted to show anyone in a good light, making his portraits of Francis Bacon and other Soho habitués look like dress rehearsals for morgue shots
They felt they could achieve anything together: two brave women in war-torn Serbia
Vera Holme and Evelina Haverfield, lovers and fellow suffragettes, risked their lives as nursing staff in the first world war and exposed the absurdity of Edwardian homophobia
What we owe to the self-taught genius Carl Linnaeus
Bumptious, uncouth and the despair of his schoolmasters, Linnaeus died almost forgotten. Yet he established a system of taxonomy that we still use two centuries later
Sir Roger Casement never deserved to hang
Executed as one of the leaders of the Easter Rising, he was absent from Dublin at the time of the doomed insurrection – and actually tried to prevent it
How country living changed the lives of three remarkable women writers
Harriet Baker describes how Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann found new forms of peace and creativity away from the stifling capital
The stark horror of Barbara Comyns’s fiction was all too autobiographical
Comyns’s fans have long enjoyed the novels’ macabre details and black humour. Now Avril Horner reveals their disturbing sources
