Book review – biography
The young Descartes: I fought, therefore I thought
Descartes is most generally known these days for being the guy who was sure he existed because he was thinking.…
Kitty Marion: too radical even for the suffragettes
The suffragettes are largely remembered not as firestarters and bombers but as pale martyrs to patriarchy. The hunger artists refusing…
There’s much of Astrid Lindgren in the carrot-haired rebel Pippi Longstocking
Pippi Longstocking is a nine-year-old girl who lives alone with a monkey and horse in a cottage called Villa Villekulla…
Henry Miller — pornographer or prophet?
Few writers seem less deserving of resuscitation than Henry Miller. When the Scottish poet and novelist John Burnside was asked…
How one man took on the French betting system — and kept winning against the odds
About a third of the way through this book I worked out that I had an unbeatable system for winning…
From persecutor to preacher: the journey of St Paul
Saint Paul is unique among those who have changed the course of history — responsible not just for one but…
Was Ada Lovelace the true founder of Silicon Valley?
It’s more than 160 years since the death of the computer pioneer Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage’s ‘enchantress of numbers’ and…
Thomas Paine: spendthrift, scrounger and polemicist of genius
‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again.’ Ronald Reagan made this most unconservative of lines…
Doris Lessing: from champion of free love to frump with a bun
‘I am interested only in stretching myself, in living as fully as I can.’ Lara Feigel begins her thoughtful book…
How a 14th-century Arab thinker influenced Ronald Reagan’s fiscal policy
At a press conference in October 1981, Ronald Reagan quoted Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) in support of what is known…
Richard Jefferies: a naturalist under the microscope
Alan Bennett once defined a classic as ‘a book everyone is assumed to have read and forgets if they have…
The Cambridge spy ring and the myth of an upper-class cover up
It has become fashionable since the fall of the Soviet Union to diagnose communist fellow travelling as a form of…
Enrico Fermi: nuclear physicist and childish practical joker
Enrico Fermi may not be a name as familiar as Einstein, Feynman or Hawking, but he was one of the…
How Raffles stole the jewel of Singapore
Accounts of the founding of the British Empire once echoed the pages of Boy’s Own, featuring visionaries, armed with a…
Mary Shelley’s monstrous creation close up
There are few more seductive figures for biographers than Mary Shelley. The daughter of the radical philosopher and novelist William…
Sex and sycophancy at Rolling Stone
Many moons ago, I worked at the New Musical Express magazine, which transformed me from virgin schoolgirl to the fabulous…
Ted Lewis: the great British crime writer you’ve never heard of
If you search Google Images for Ted Lewis, the results show an American jazz-age band-leader in a battered top hat,…
Romance and rejection
‘Outsider’ ought to be an important word. To attach it to someone, particularly a writer, is to suggest that their…
A sensual Greek goddess
Joan Leigh Fermor died in 2003, aged 91, after falling in her bathroom in the house on a rocky headland…
August Auguste
In 1959 the formidable interviewer John Freeman took the Face to Face crew to the 81-year-old Augustus John’s studio. The…
Mozart’s mischievous muse
If you were to compare Mozart to a bird it wouldn’t be the starling. Possibly the wood thrush or nightingale,…
The writer behind the brand
Few publishing phenomena in recent years have been as gratifying as Chris Kraus’s cult 1997 masterpiece I Love Dick becoming…
A flawed and dangerous theory
If there were a prize awarded to the book with the best opening line, A. N. Wilson would be clearing…
The last great adventure
Towards the end of his life, Robert Louis Stevenson travelled widely in the central and southern Pacific Ocean. As well…
Two enquiring minds
Samuel Pepys, wrote John Evelyn, was ‘universally beloved, hospitable, generous, learned in many things’ and ‘skilled in music’. John Evelyn,…
