Book review – biography

Composer, conductor, author, pianist, lecturer — was there anything Leonard Bernstein couldn’t do?

29 November 2014 9:00 am

On 17 May 1969 Leonard Bernstein ended his 12-year run as musical director of the New York Philharmonic with a…

Margot dressed as an oriental snake charmer for a fancy dress ball at Devonshire House in 1897

Move over Downton: Margot and the Asquiths’ marital soap opera

29 November 2014 9:00 am

You might be forgiven for thinking that there is no need for yet another book about Margot Asquith. Her War…

Sabina Spielrein: from psychiatric patient to psychoanalyst

29 November 2014 9:00 am

Sabina Spielrein was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with groundbreaking ideas about the role of the reproductive drive in human psychology…

Bing and Bob on the Road to Singapore. One had talent; the other tried harder

Did anyone ever really love Bob Hope?

22 November 2014 9:00 am

Why does everything these days have to be a superlative? Why must writers scream for our attention, yelling that the…

Vita as ‘Lady with a Red Hat’ by William Strang

Vita in her ivory tower: a portrait of a lonely, lovelorn aristocrat who yearned to be mistress of her own ancestral home

22 November 2014 9:00 am

Visitors to the National Trust’s Sissinghurst — the decayed Elizabethan castle transformed by Vita Sackville-West in the early 1930s —…

What went so wrong for Vaclav Havel?

8 November 2014 9:00 am

The unforgettable moment a quarter of a century ago when the Berlin Wall came down was the most vivid drama…

A Stratford Stalin: the nasty, aggressive and stupid world of Joan Littlewood

8 November 2014 9:00 am

If Stalin had been a theatre director he’d have resembled Joan Littlewood. What an outstandingly unpleasant woman she was —…

Cat among the pigeons: Jennifer Fry, the exotic beauty who so disrupted life at Farringdon House in the 1940s

My mad gay grandfather and me

18 October 2014 9:00 am

Mirabel Cecil on Lord Berners’s volatile ménage — as surprising and colourful as his famous dyed doves

The Etonian peer who became an assistant to a Mexican commie

18 October 2014 9:00 am

The lefty hereditary peer has few equals as a figure of fun, in life or literature. The late Tony Benn…

Ezra Pound in the early 1920s

Ezra Pound – the fascist years

18 October 2014 9:00 am

‘There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?/ They don’t make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,…

Shackleton’s ship the Nimrod in the ice at McMurdo Sound

Flawed, unproductive and heroic: the real Ernest Shackleton

11 October 2014 9:00 am

Polar explorers are often cast as mavericks, and this is hardly surprising. The profession requires a disdain for pseudo-orthodoxies and,…

The young T.E. Lawrence in Arab dress

Secretive, arrogant and reckless: the young T.E. Lawrence began life as he meant to go on

11 October 2014 9:00 am

The Lawrence books are piling up, aren’t they? I don’t mean the author of The Rainbow, though as I write…

All too briefly together: Esmond and Jessica working behind a bar in Miami in 1940

Jessica Mitford and Esmond Romilly – crusaders, chancers, spongers

4 October 2014 9:00 am

Even ardent Mitfordians must quake at the sight of yet another biography of the sisterhood. There have been more forests…

Paul Rosenberg with a Matisse painting in the 1930s

Picasso’s dealer

4 October 2014 9:00 am

When she was four, Anne Sinclair had her portrait painted by Marie Laurencin. It is a charming picture, a little…

Tennessee Williams on the stage set of A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)

Confused, unbalanced, brilliant: the Blanche Dubois of Tennessee Williams biographies

20 September 2014 9:00 am

Thomas W. Hodgkinson finds John Lahr’s ‘stand-alone’ biography of Tennessee Williams as confused and unbalanced as Streetcar’s heroine

Bobby Moore in 1966 — so far the only Englishman to lift the World Cup

‘Like Superman stopping a runaway train’: when Bobby Moore tackled Jairzinho

20 September 2014 9:00 am

Nothing illustrates the transformation in the working lives of professional footballers since the end of the maximum wage better than…

Always a better novelist than her husband: Pamela Hansford Johnson in 1949

Literature's least attractive power couple

20 September 2014 9:00 am

This book charts the rise and fall of one of the strangest power couples of modern times. The senior partner…

David Hockney, photographed by Christopher Simon Sykes

David Hockney, our most popular and hardworking living artist, returns to the easel

20 September 2014 9:00 am

The first volume of Christopher Simon Sykes’s biography of David Hockney ended in the summer of 1975. The 38-year-old painter…

How dare this author trash one of the great screenwriters of the 20th century?

13 September 2014 9:00 am

Should one say ‘vicious circle’ or ‘vicious cycle’? That’s a question that just goes round and round inside my head.…

The biography that makes Philip Larkin human again

23 August 2014 9:00 am

We needn’t apologise for Philip Larkin any longer, says Peter J. Conradi. His place is unmistakeably among the greats

Charles Scott Moncrieff (left) had a deep personal affinity with Proust (right). His rendering of 'À La Recherche du Temps Perdu' is considered one of the greatest literary translations of all time

Soldier, poet, lover, spy: just the man to translate Proust

16 August 2014 9:00 am

Sam Leith is astonished by how much the multi-talented Charles Scott Moncrieff achieved in his short lifetime

James Bond's secret: he's Jamaican

9 August 2014 9:00 am

Lewis Jones on Ian Fleming’s Jamaican retreat and the inspiration it provided for the Bond novels

The robber baron who 'bought judges as other men buy food’

2 August 2014 9:00 am

The robber barons of the gilded age, at the turn of the 20th century, were the most ruthless accumulators of…

Leading with the chin: Dusty Springfield in the mid 1960s

The mad, bad and sad life of Dusty Springfield

2 August 2014 9:00 am

Call me a crazy old physiognomist, but my theory is that you can always spot a lesbian by her big…

A boy named Marion: John Wayne pictured on the set of Stagecoach (1939)

John Wayne, accidental cowboy

26 July 2014 9:00 am

I’m not making a picture [The Green Berets] about Vietnam, I’m making a picture about good against bad. I happen…