Biography

A character assassination of Rudy Giuliani

17 September 2022 9:00 am

Lord help me I love a hatchet job, and you’ll have to too if you want to make it through…

Ballet comes of age with Sergei Diaghilev

10 September 2022 9:00 am

‘What exactly is it you do?’ asked a bamboozled King Alfonso XIII of Spain upon meeting Sergei Diaghilev at a…

The visionary genius of Harold Wilson

27 August 2022 9:00 am

‘Our generation owes an apology to the shades of Harold Wilson,’ the polling guru Peter Kellner once told me. Had…

The short-lived wonder of Creedence Clearwater Revival

27 August 2022 9:00 am

Million-selling rock bands are rarely happy families. They are an uneasy combination of a creative alliance and a business partnership,…

Aleister Crowley was even more beastly than we’d imagined

20 August 2022 9:00 am

I have never had much time for Aleister Crowley. Magic(k) is nonsense; the mystical societies he founded were simply pretexts…

Harpo Marx – genius, idiot savant or lovable overgrown child?

20 August 2022 9:00 am

It’s hard (if not impossible) to imagine a world worth living in that doesn’t include the Marx Brothers; and equally…

In search of the peripatetic philosopher Theophrastus

20 August 2022 9:00 am

Publishers lately seem to have got the idea that otherwise uncommercial subjects might be rendered sexy if presented with a…

Why was Henrietta Maria, Charles I’s beautiful wife, so reviled?

20 August 2022 9:00 am

On 15 June 1645, as Thomas Fairfax’s soldiers picked over the scattered debris on the Naseby battlefield, they made a…

How Alice Prin conquered bohemian Paris

13 August 2022 9:00 am

This book is about two people who reinvented themselves in 1920s Paris. Mark Braude focuses on Kiki de Montparnasse and…

Who planned Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson’s murder?

30 July 2022 9:00 am

Until very recently, political assassination was a mercifully uncommon occurrence in British politics, though that has changed. Previously when such…

Homage to Sydney Kentridge, South Africa’s courtroom giant

30 July 2022 9:00 am

Sydney Kentridge, the protagonist of Thomas Grant’s superb legal saga The Mandela Brief, is that trickiest of biographical subjects: a…

Lord Northcliffe’s war of words

30 July 2022 9:00 am

Andrew Lycett on the pugnacious British press baron dedicated to fighting the first world war through newsprint

‘That little venal borough’: a poet’s jaundiced view of Aldeburgh

25 June 2022 9:00 am

‘To talk about Crabbe is to talk about England,’ E.M. Forster declared in a radio broadcast in May 1941, but…

What shape is the Treasury in now?

18 June 2022 9:00 am

Don’t bring a bottle. Your chances of finding a party in full swing down those chilly corridors are close to…

Is T.S. Eliot’s great aura fading?

4 June 2022 9:00 am

Cracks are beginning to appear in T.S. Eliot’s once unassailable reputation, says Philip Hensher

The lonely genius of Bronislava Nijinska

28 May 2022 9:00 am

Bronislava Nijinska was constantly undermined in her lifetime – most cruelly by her brother, says Sarah Crompton

Is Anna Wintour human?

21 May 2022 9:00 am

Apparently Anna Wintour wants to be seen as human, and Amy Odell’s biography goes some way to helping her achieve…

Friend of Elizabethan exiles: the colourful life of Jane Dormer

7 May 2022 9:00 am

Thomas Cromwell’s biographer Diarmaid MacCulloch once told me that my father’s family, the Dormers, had been servants of the great…

Gardening’s bad girl: the genius – and malice – of Ellen Willmott

7 May 2022 9:00 am

In October 1897, the grandees of the Royal Horticultural Society gathered to bestow their highest award, the Victoria Medal of…

Disregarded for decades, Jean Rhys stayed true to her vision of life

7 May 2022 9:00 am

Jean Rhys lived a vagabond life – but she wrote about gloom and squalor with luminous purity and a poet’s care, says Lucasta Miller

Is Mark Twain’s old age best forgotten?

7 May 2022 9:00 am

Mark Twain conquered almost every challenge that came his way except old age. Living well into his seventies, he was…

Boris Iofan – cunning apparatchik of a loathsome regime

30 April 2022 9:00 am

The invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces has rendered what might otherwise have seemed a fairly niche study of a…

The effortless magnetism of Marcel Duchamp

30 April 2022 9:00 am

One could compile a fat anthology of tributes to Marcel Duchamp’s charm – especially what one friend called the artist’s…

Nymphomaniac, fearless campaigner, alcoholic – Nancy Cunard was all this and more

23 April 2022 9:00 am

Nancy Cunard’s defiance of convention began early, fuelled by bitter resentment towards her mother, says Jane Ridley

Stewart Brand: man of ideas and infuriating contrarian

16 April 2022 9:00 am

In his 2005 book What The Dormouse Said John Markoff traced the roots of the personal computer industry to the…