Biography
The jab that saved countless lives 300 years ago
This timely book celebrates one of the most remarkable women of the 18th century. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was so…
Apostle of modernism: Clive Bell’s reputation repaired
Clive Bell is the perennial supporting character in the biographies of the Bloomsbury group. The husband of Vanessa Bell, brother-in-law…
An unsuitable attachment to Nazism: Barbara Pym in the 1930s
Vicars, tea parties and village fetes were a far cry from Barbara Pym’s early enthusiasms, Philip Hensher reveals
Shock tactics: the flamboyant life of a Hanoverian maid of honour
At the masquerade celebrating the end of the War of Austrian Succession no one could take their eyes off the…
Bob Dylan — from respected young songwriter to Voice of a Generation
Bob Dylan didn’t just assimilate the Great American Songbook – he vastly increased its size and variety, says Andrew Motion
Sleeping with the enemy: the wartime story of ‘La Chatte’
The name ‘Carré’ immediately evokes the shadowy world of espionage. Ironically, however, few people today have heard of the real…
Working remotely: five formidable female anthropologists
I was first sent a version of Undreamed Shores: The Hidden Heroines of British Anthropology in June last year. I…
Philip Roth — most meta of novelists, and most honest
Philip Roth was prepared to stare the soul resolutely in the face – and for that he can be forgiven most things, says David Baddiel
Bugsy Siegel — the gangster straight out of a Hollywood movie
Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel was about as meta-gangsterish as a real life gangster could get. Born in the slums of Manhattan’s…
Edward Said — a lonely prophet of doom
Even Edward Said would not have claimed to be ‘the 20th century’s most celebrated intellectual’. But neither was he ‘Professor of Terror’, says Justin Marozzi
Ghosts in a landscape: farming life through the eyes of Thomas Hennell
Thomas Hennell is one of that generation of painters born in 1903 whose collective achievements are such an adornment of…
All good friends and jolly good company: life with the Crichel Boys
In the spring of 1945 three men pooled their resources in order to buy Long Crichel House, a former rectory…
The stuff of fiction: Elizabeth Bowen exploits her extra-marital affairs
Lara Feigel tells of the passion, pain and sexual exploitation involved in Elizabeth Bowen’s affair with a young married scholar
Francis Bacon: king of the self-made myth
In 1953, Francis Bacon’s friends Lucian Freud and Caroline Blackwood were concerned about the painter’s health. His liver was in…
The serious rows at Marvel Comics
If Marvel characters seem dysfunctional, just look at their creators, says Dorian Lynskey
Imagining a future for John Keats — the novelist
Keats is a much stranger poet than we tend to realise – who shocked his first readers by his vulgarity and gross indecency, says Philip Hensher
Betrayal was a routine business for George Blake
Kim Philby once remarked to the journalist Murray Sayle that ‘to betray, you must first belong. I never belonged’. Kim,…
How did Robert Maxwell fool most of the people most of the time?
‘Everyone’s heard of Ghislaine Maxwell,’ says the blurb for Power: The Maxwells, a podcast series launched last month. ‘But there’s…
Rescuing Elizabeth Barrett Browning from her wax-doll image
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an ambitious, passionate, determined woman – not the sad-eyed invalid of legend, says Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
A burnt-out case: the many lives of Dr Anthony Clare
Those who best remember Dr Anthony Clare (1942-2007) for his broadcasting are firmly reminded by this biography that we didn’t…
The programme of art plunder initiated by Hermann Göring continued long after the war’s end
Making one’s fortune in Occupied Paris was largely a matter of knowing the right people: in fact, the further to…
Murder most casual: why Patricia Highsmith’s thrillers are so chilling
Patricia Highsmith’s life was filled with more eccentric, disturbing brilliance than most readers can normally handle; and so the chief…
Dolly Parton represents all that’s best about America
Dolly Parton is the living embodiment of America’s best values, says Philip Hensher
The life and loves of Mary Wollstonecraft
Ruth Scurr reveals what an impulsive, life-loving individual Mary Wollstonecraft was
The only man who didn’t want to be Cary Grant was Cary Grant himself
Cary Grant was a hoax so sublime his creator struggled to escape him. He was a metaphor, too, for the…
