Biography
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…
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…
