Biography
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…
Mozart the infant prodigy was also a child of the Enlightenment
‘My dear young man: don’t take it too hard,’ Joseph II counsels a puppyish Mozart, the colour of his hair…
Joseph Ratzinger’s coat of many colours
A common but flawed assumption about Joseph Ratzinger is that he is simply an ardent conservative. That’s the figure we…
War was never Sir Edward Grey’s métier
This meaty but easily digested biography pivots around the events either side of that fateful evening of 4 August 1914…
Why I stopped reading novels
New York I received a letter from a long-time Spectatorreader, James Hackett, enquiring about books I am reading. It is…
No writer was better suited to chronicle the Depression than John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck didn’t believe in God — but he didn’t believe much in humanity either. When push came to shove,…
Four German-speaking philosophers in search of a theme
How do you write a group biography of people who never actually formed a group? Such is the challenge Wolfram…
Driven to distraction — the unhappy life of Vivien Eliot
Do you think your mother slept with T.S. Eliot? That was the question I needed to ask the 98-year-old in…
The courage of a madman: Maurice Wilson’s doomed assault on Everest
Reinhold Messner, the first person to climb all 14 of the planet’s peaks higher than 8,000 metres, is probably the…
Sybille Bedford — a gifted writer but a monstrous snob
Sybille Bedford died in 2006, just short of 95. She left four novels, a travel book, two volumes of legal…
Tom Bower pulls his punches with his life of Boris Johnson
The Prime Minister may have lost his bounce –but perhaps that’s no bad thing, says Lynn Barber
The gospel of separation according to Malcolm X
In late April 1962 Los Angeles police shot and killed an unarmed black man, Ronald X Stokes, during a disturbance…
Diplomatic daughters go behind the scenes at Yalta
From Downing Street to Pennsylvania Avenue, history’s powerful inter-family influencers, whether spouses or children, have long operated behind weighty political…
Victoria Wood: stiletto in an oven glove
Even if you didn’t have an Auntie Dot in Cockermouth (the one who ate a raffia drinks coaster, mistaking it…
‘I wonder about his humanity’: Malcolm McDowell on Stanley Kubrick
Twenty-five years after making Spartacus, a parable of Roman decadence and rebellious slaves shot in California, Stanley Kubrick made Full…
The ‘unremarkable’ life of SS officer Robert Griesinger
In October 2011 Daniel Lee was at a dinner party at which a Dutch woman told a disturbing story. It…
A cat’s-eye view of 18th-century social history
Jeoffry is, by now, one of the best-known cats in literary history. And unlike the Cheshire Cat, Mr Mistoffelees, Orlando,…
We all love a poltergeist story
There are fashions in the paranormal as in everything else. Since the famous Enfield hauntings of the late 1970s, poltergeists…
Ladies’ man: Tom Stoppard’s love life revealed
Tom Stoppard is a non-stop genius of jokes – but many of them make his latest biographer uneasy, says Craig Raine
The magic of JFK remains undimmed
It’s easy to forget that John F. Kennedy lived such a short life. At 43, he was the second youngest…
As Lucian Freud’s fame increases his indiscretions multiply
Staying with Peregrine Eliot (later 10th Earl of St Germans) at Port Eliot in Cornwall, Lucian Freud remembered that the…
