Book review – biography

Hitler with the Goebbels family in the late 1930s

Joseph Goebbels: Hitler’s ‘little doctor’ was devoted unto death

9 May 2015 9:00 am

It is ironic that this weighty biography of Hitler’s evil genius of a propaganda minister is published on the day…

Moura Budberg with two of her lovers, H.G. Wells and Maxim Gorky

A passion for men and intrigue

9 May 2015 9:00 am

Moura Budberg (1892–1974) had an extraordinary life. She was born in the Poltava region of Ukraine, and as a young…

Family photo of Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow’s fiction: a warehouse of stolen property

2 May 2015 9:00 am

Saul Bellow’s lurid personal life — especially the triangular relationship with his wife and her lover — was the basis for his best work, says Craig Raine

St George as depicted in The Golden Legend

St George: patron saint of England, patronised by all

25 April 2015 9:00 am

What did St George do? Killed a dragon, as everyone knows. And yet, as Samantha Riches points out, no mention…

Mary Shelley by Richard Rothwell

There’s something about Mary (Wollstonecraft and Shelley)

25 April 2015 9:00 am

If Mary Wollstonecraft, as she once declared, ‘was not born to tred in the beaten track’, the same with even…

Tippi Hedren helps save schoolchildren in The Birds. Hitchcock confided to François Truffaut that he’d had ‘some emotional problems’ with Hedren during the shoot. For the final scene, live birds were attached to Hedren’s clothes. The actress became increasingly hysterical over the course of the week it took to film it, and when a bird finally went for her eyes, she collapsed

A profile of the worlds’s most famous film director — with the most famous profile

18 April 2015 9:00 am

‘Do it with scissors’ was Alfred Hitchcock’s advice for prospective murderers, though a glance at these two biographies reminds us…

Following Galileo’s discoveries, a rugged, cratered moon is depicted (with papal approval) by Ludovico Cigoli in his ‘Assumption of the Virgin in the Pauline Chapel’

Moving heaven and earth: Galileo’s subversive spyglass

11 April 2015 9:00 am

We live in an age of astronomical marvels. Last year Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft made a daring rendezvous with the comet…

Did Mrs Thatcher ‘do’ God? Denis thought so, and he should know, says Charles Moore

11 April 2015 9:00 am

As I swink in the field of Thatcher studies, this book brings refreshment. It is a welcome and rare. Far…

Charles Dodgson

Stolen kisses and naked girls: there is much to wonder about in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland

28 March 2015 9:00 am

A.S. Byatt explores the dark alternatives to innocence in Lewis Carroll’s deeply disturbing looking-glass world

Although Keynes hated his appearance, he was much painted by the Bloomsbury Group, including by Roger Fry (above)

John Maynard Keynes: transforming global economy while reading Virginia Woolf

28 March 2015 9:00 am

To the 21st-century right, especially in the United States, John Maynard Keynes has become a much-hated figure whose name is…

The Kinks in their Sixties heyday— Ray Davies is far right, next to his brother Dave

Ray Davies: part of Swinging Sixties London — and apart from it too

21 March 2015 9:00 am

As Johnny Rogan notes in this new biography of Ray Davies and the Kinks, it is almost 50 years since…

For his supposed involvement in a conspiracy against Nero, Seneca is ordered to commit suicide — as depicted in The Nuremberg Chronicle , 1493

Men behaving badly: Nero, Claudius and even Seneca could be intensely cruel to women — and fish

21 March 2015 9:00 am

They lived in barrels, they camped on top of columns, or in caves: the lives of the sages are often…

Henry Walter Bates supervises the capture of an alligator in the Amazon

All in the name of science: three young naturalists go on an Amazonian killing-spree

21 March 2015 9:00 am

John Hemming is our greatest living scholar-explorer. He is best known for his extraordinary first book The Conquest of the…

Anders Brievik: lonely computer-gamer on a killing spree

14 March 2015 9:00 am

In 2011, Anders Breivik murdered 69 teenagers in a socialist summer camp outside the Norwegian capital of Oslo, and eight…

John Aubrey and his circle: those magnificent men and their flying machines

14 March 2015 9:00 am

John Aubrey investigated everything from the workings of the brain, the causation of winds and the origins of Stonehenge to…

Portrait of Lord Dufferin, 1893

The first Lord Dufferin: the eclipse of a most eminent Victorian

28 February 2015 9:00 am

The first Marquess of Dufferin and Ava is largely forgotten today — rotten luck for the great diplomat of the…

Poster for an exhibition of Mayakovsky’s works, 1930

Both lyricist and agitator: the split personality of Vladimir Mayakovsky

21 February 2015 9:00 am

Why increase the number of suicides? Better to increase the output of ink! wrote Vladimir Mayakovsky in 1926 in response…

Tom Eliot — a very practical cat. Did T.S. Eliot simply recycle every personal experience into poetry?

31 January 2015 9:00 am

T.S. Eliot may have put much of his early life into his poetry, says Daniel Swift, but The Waste Land remains a marvellous mystery that defies explanation

The King Kong of the thriller: the phenomenal output of Edgar Wallace, once the world’s most popular author

31 January 2015 9:00 am

At the time of his death in 1932 Edgar Wallace had published some 200 books, 25 plays, 45 collections of…

Muriel and Nellie: two radical Christians build Jerusalem in London’s East End

31 January 2015 9:00 am

This is the tale of Muriel Lester, once famous pacifist and social reformer, and Nellie Dowell, her invisible friend. Nellie…

‘Ash tree in Winter, 2010–13

Patrick George: painting some of his best work at 91

17 January 2015 9:00 am

‘If I see something I like I wish to tell someone else; this… is why I paint.’ Patrick George is…

Wonder Woman: feminist symbol or the ultimate male fantasy?

13 December 2014 9:00 am

It’s always interesting when people succeed in two different arenas — like Mike Nesmith’s mum, who gave the world both…

Hiding in Moominland: the conflicted life of Tove Jansson

13 December 2014 9:00 am

Tove Jansson’s father was a sculptor specialising in war memorials to the heroes of the White Guard of the Finnish…

Eugene O’Neill with his last wife, the actress Carlotta Monterey, who safeguarded him, and enabled him to write his later plays, though friends and family considered her his jailer

Eugene O’Neill: the dark genius of American theatre

29 November 2014 9:00 am

Sarah Churchwell on how Eugene O’Neill virtually single-handedly revolutionised American theatre in the first half of the 20th century

Jerry Lee Lewis: interrogating ‘The Killer’

29 November 2014 9:00 am

‘I ain’t never pretended to be anything,’ says the man they call the Killer. ‘I’ve lived my life to the…