Book review – biography
A Stratford Stalin: the nasty, aggressive and stupid world of Joan Littlewood
If Stalin had been a theatre director he’d have resembled Joan Littlewood. What an outstandingly unpleasant woman she was —…
My mad gay grandfather and me
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
The lefty hereditary peer has few equals as a figure of fun, in life or literature. The late Tony Benn…
Ezra Pound – the fascist years
‘There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?/ They don’t make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,…
Flawed, unproductive and heroic: the real Ernest Shackleton
Polar explorers are often cast as mavericks, and this is hardly surprising. The profession requires a disdain for pseudo-orthodoxies and,…
Secretive, arrogant and reckless: the young T.E. Lawrence began life as he meant to go on
The Lawrence books are piling up, aren’t they? I don’t mean the author of The Rainbow, though as I write…
Jessica Mitford and Esmond Romilly – crusaders, chancers, spongers
Even ardent Mitfordians must quake at the sight of yet another biography of the sisterhood. There have been more forests…
Picasso’s dealer
When she was four, Anne Sinclair had her portrait painted by Marie Laurencin. It is a charming picture, a little…
Confused, unbalanced, brilliant: the Blanche Dubois of Tennessee Williams biographies
Thomas W. Hodgkinson finds John Lahr’s ‘stand-alone’ biography of Tennessee Williams as confused and unbalanced as Streetcar’s heroine
‘Like Superman stopping a runaway train’: when Bobby Moore tackled Jairzinho
Nothing illustrates the transformation in the working lives of professional footballers since the end of the maximum wage better than…
Literature's least attractive power couple
This book charts the rise and fall of one of the strangest power couples of modern times. The senior partner…
David Hockney, our most popular and hardworking living artist, returns to the easel
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?
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
We needn’t apologise for Philip Larkin any longer, says Peter J. Conradi. His place is unmistakeably among the greats
Soldier, poet, lover, spy: just the man to translate Proust
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
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’
The robber barons of the gilded age, at the turn of the 20th century, were the most ruthless accumulators of…
The mad, bad and sad life of Dusty Springfield
Call me a crazy old physiognomist, but my theory is that you can always spot a lesbian by her big…
John Wayne, accidental cowboy
I’m not making a picture [The Green Berets] about Vietnam, I’m making a picture about good against bad. I happen…
Daring? No. Well written? Yes
This has all the appearance of a book invented by a publisher. Two years ago W. Sydney Robinson published an…
Lillian Hellman lied her way through life
Lillian Hellman must be a maddening subject for a biographer. The author Mary McCarthy’s remark that ‘every word she writes…
Caught between Marx and a monster
‘Curious to see Mrs Aveling addressing the enormous crowd, curious to see the eyes of the women fixed upon her…
Thug, rapist, poetic visionary: the contradictory Earl of Rochester
Philip Hensher on the scandalous 17th-century courtier whose hellfire reputation has overshadowed his fine satirical poetry
The gentle intoxications of Laurie Lee
On Laurie Lee’s centenary, Jeremy Treglown wonders how the writer’s legacy stands up
The American who dreamed of peace for the Arabs – but was murdered in their midst
‘Arabist’ is fast becoming an archaism. Perhaps it is already one. These days the word conjures up enchanting visions of…
