Book review – biography

What prompted Vivien Leigh’s dark journey into madness?

7 September 2024 9:00 am

Did her many miscarriages so unhinge the beautiful actress that she ended up a sex-crazed harridan, screaming obscenities at those she loved?

The spy with the bullet-proof Rolls-Royce

7 September 2024 9:00 am

Stationed in Paris from 1926 to 1940, the wealthy, debonair ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale, often seen as a model for James Bond, was also a supremely effective intelligence officer

The great French painter who had no time for France

7 September 2024 9:00 am

Describing himself as the ‘savage from Peru’, Paul Gauguin avoided French society when he could, returning to Polynesia in 1895, where he spent his final years on the island of Hiva Oa

No one could match Tess, to Thomas Hardy’s dismay

3 February 2024 9:00 am

Hardy’s 38-year marriage to Emma Gifford was notoriously acrimonious; but even his much younger second wife, Florence, never seemed to measure up to his fictional heroines

Nothing satisfies Madonna for very long

16 December 2023 9:00 am

Her ‘rebel’ life, as told by Mary Gabriel, has been a frenzied churn of friends, lovers, mentors and collaborators, vital to her for a year or two and then discarded

Love and loathing at Harold Wilson’s No. 10

11 November 2023 9:00 am

Even her enemies considered Marcia Williams the prime minister’s ‘political wife’, and the real force in the Labour party from the mid-1960s to Wilson’s resignation

Where are the Henry Kissingers when we need them?

16 May 2020 9:00 am

It was not until I went to Harvard in 1988 to take a year out from the Foreign Office that…

La Bayadère was first staged by Marius Petipa at the Bolshoi in 1877, to the music of Ludwig Minkus

Where would ballet be without Marius Petipa?

27 July 2019 9:00 am

Should the man on the Clapham omnibus ever turn his mind to ballet, he is bound to envisage the work…

Klaus Fuchs after his release from prison in 1959

How Klaus Fuchs’s treachery may have averted Armageddon

27 July 2019 9:00 am

When Klaus Fuchs started passing atomic secrets to the KGB, he changed the course of world events. Forget about Philby…

Growing up in the wooded hills round Limpsfield, the girls climbed trees, built huts, made fires and skinned rabbits

The free-spirited sisters who galvanised the Bloomsbury Group

29 June 2019 9:00 am

It was high time we had a proper look at the four beautiful, original Olivier sisters. Hitherto, with one exception,…

Maud West disguised as a Salvation Army worker, c. 1920

The rollicking adventures of a real-life female sleuth

15 June 2019 9:00 am

Susannah Stapleton’s erudite but hugely entertaining debut is a true-life detective story about the quest for a true-life detective. A…

Vasily Grossman: eye-witness to the 20th century’s worst atrocities

20 April 2019 9:00 am

Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate (completed in 1960) has been hailed as a 20th-century War and Peace. It has…

Was there no end to John Buchan’s talents?

20 April 2019 9:00 am

John Buchan was a novelist, historian, poet, biographer and journalist (assistant editor of The Spectator indeed); a barrister and publisher;…

Portrait of Ruskin dated 1870

John Ruskin: the making of a modern prophet

16 February 2019 9:00 am

At the time of his death in 1900, John Ruskin was, according to Andrew Hill, ‘perhaps the most famous living…

The inventor of gonzo journalism: Hunter S. Thompson, in his heyday in the 1960s

How fear and loathing of Nixon sent Hunter S. Thompson crazy

16 February 2019 9:00 am

Hunter Stockton Thompson blazed across the republic of American arts and letters for too short a time. When in February…

James Clerk Maxwell: funny, flippant and charming, with an extraordinarily fertile mechanical imagination

The powerful magnetism of James Clerk Maxwell

16 February 2019 9:00 am

Chances are, you are reading these words in some room or other. Build a wall down the middle of it,…

Marie Colvin, a year before her death. [Rex Features]

For Marie Colvin, mortal danger was what made life worth living

1 December 2018 9:00 am

When Britain finally lowered the flag in the Iraqi city of Basra in 2007, the army’s top brass valiantly claimed…

Handel is rowed in a gondola on the Thames, in an illustration for ‘The Water Music’

Handel’s greatest hits — the glorious London decades

15 September 2018 9:00 am

England has been home to three great composer-entrepreneurs since 1700: Benjamin Britten in the 20th century; Arthur Sullivan in the…

Lord Carrington. Credit: Getty Images

Peter Carrington: loyal, funny and driven by a sense of duty

15 September 2018 9:00 am

‘I’m sorry to bother you, Peter, but you were a famously successful Leader of Their Lordships and I wondered whether…

Harvey Milk. Credit Getty Images

The ‘other’ life of Harvey Milk

15 September 2018 9:00 am

This is the story of the ‘other’ Harvey Milk. We all know about Harvey the San Francisco politician who was…

Jimmy Page performing with Led Zeppelin in May 1975. ‘He did believe that he had the power to control the universe’

Jimmy Page is a Capricorn – that says it all

25 August 2018 9:00 am

In 1957, aged 13, Jimmy Page appeared with his skiffle group on a children’s TV programme dedicated to ‘unusual hobbies’…

When Graves was wounded at High Wood on the Somme he was listed as dead. The sense of being a revenant probably affected him for the rest of his life. [Mary Evans Picture Library}

Ménage à quatre with Robert Graves

18 August 2018 9:00 am

‘I have a very poor opinion of other people’s opinion of me — though I am fairly happy in my…

Anita Leslie, aged 23 in 1937 © Tarka Leslie-King

Anita Leslie: sparkling socialite with the Croix de Guerre

18 August 2018 9:00 am

Anita Leslie knew how to tell a story. Arranging to sit for a portrait six months before she died, she…

Bruce Lee in a scene from Enter the Dragon

Bruce Lee: weird, gruesome and oh-so-cool

28 July 2018 9:00 am

Every cinema-loving person has a favourite Bruce Lee moment. My own comes towards the end of Enter the Dragon, the…

Mandela revisits his prison cell on Robben Island in 1994 [Getty]

What Nelson Mandela really craved in prison: Pond’s Cold Cream

28 July 2018 9:00 am

So much rubbish has been written over the years by those who feared, revered or pretended to know Nelson Mandela…