Biography

Thursday

Christopher Bray

David Bowie: the boy who never gave up

A few years ago Will Brooker spent 12 months pretending to be David Bowie. For several weeks he dressed up as Ziggy Stardust (gold bindi, maroon mullet, jumpsuit run up from old curtains), then as Aladdin Sane (blue and red lightning slash daubed across face), then as the Thin White Duke (black waistcoat, black eyeliner, slicked-back hair). And so on, right through every satin-and-tat get-up of Bowie’s long career. What larks! And yet. I don’t know whether Brooker had his mother in a whirl, but he certainly had some of us wondering what was going on in the groves of academe. Did I mention that these wardrobe antics were part

Wednesday

Lynn Barber

Burnt out at 27: the tragedy of Janis Joplin

Janis Joplin hated the word ‘star’, but she loved the trappings. As soon as she made serious money she bought a Porsche convertible and had it painted with psychedelic images to make it the most recognisable car in San Francisco. She also rejoiced in her lynx fur coat, courtesy of Southern Comfort. She sent them a file of all the numerous press clippings that said Southern Comfort was her favourite tipple and they responded with a cheque. ‘Oh man, that was the best hustle I ever pulled,’ she crowed to a reporter. ‘Can you imagine getting paid for passing out for two years?’ If only she’d stuck to Southern Comfort

Honor Clerk

The genius of Reynolds Stone: a private man in a public world

You may not know the name of Reynolds Stone, but it is almost impossible that you haven’t come across his designs. If you’re familiar with the masthead of the Economist or remember the clock on the top of the front page of the Times; if you’ve seen the colophon on a book published by the Folio Society or Hamish Hamilton or owned a Penguin edition of Shakespeare; if you’ve borrowed something from the London Library; if you had a £5 note in your wallet in the 1960s; if you’ve walked over the memorial to Winston Churchill on the floor of Westminster Abbey or if you own a passport with the

William Waldegrave

How troll stories blighted the life of Patrick O’Brian

Patrick O’Brian, born Richard Patrick Russ, never wanted his life written, and this passionate wish presents the first hurdle to someone as fond of him as was Nikolai Tolstoy, the son of O’Brian’s second wife, Mary, by her first husband. Why pry further? Why deploy papers and diaries which O’Brian expressly instructed should be destroyed? To this objection, Tolstoy can offer two replies, and both are powerful. First, one biography already exists, not only unauthorised but deeply resented by O’Brian in his lifetime; and on the basis of that book, and of partial evidence from one faction within a fairly dysfunctional family, some unpleasant accusations have been made about O’Brian’s

Thursday

Greg Garrett

James Baldwin’s radicalism was part Marxist, part Christian

Great biographies try to answer questions about the complicated relationship between their subjects’ inner life and outer workings. How did Winston Churchill turn the pain of his early life and his years in the political wilderness into the words that galvanised the free world? How did Frida Kahlo’s physical impairment shape her vision as a painter? I am endlessly interested in the inner and outer lives of the African–American writer and activist James Baldwin, for my money not just the most important black writer of the past 100 years, but one of the most important American writers ever. Although we differ wildly in our life experience — I am a

Thursday

Adam Begley

Meet Dr Love: the infallibly seductive, pioneering French gynaecologist

Do not google Samuel Jean Pozzi. If you want to enjoy Julian Barnes’s The Man in the Red Coat — and believe me, it’s teeming with delights — stay away from search engines and trust the author to tell the story in his own way. But just to get you started: Pozzi (1846–1918), the man John Singer Sargent painted, gloriously, in sumptuous red, was a Frenchman, a prominent, pioneering doctor in Belle Epoque Paris, and a charming, ubiquitous, infallibly seductive socialite. (‘Disgustingly handsome’ is how the Princess of Monaco described him.) He was Sarah Bernhardt’s doctor and also her lover; she called him ‘Docteur Dieu’. (His other nickname was ‘L’Amour

Thursday

Boyd Tonkin

Living life to the full

In 1971, Tove Jansson paid one of her many visits to London, where 1960s fashion hangovers made the whole city look like ‘one big fancy-dress ball’. When not partying to celebrate 20 years of British editions for her Moomin books, she and her life-partner ‘Tooti’ — the artist Tuulikki Pietilä — caught performances of Hair (‘a grand glorification of psychedelic hippiedom’) and the ‘racy’ Canterbury Tales musical. They also saw that ‘incredibly powerful’ film, The Trials of Oscar Wilde — ‘very unlikely to come to Finland, unfortunately’. Foreign admirers sometimes presume that, in postwar Finland, Jansson found it easy to be both a saintly godmother of children’s literature and a

Oliver Soden

Edith Nesbit — a children’s writer of genius who disinherited her own adopted offspring

‘When one writes for children,’ the novelist Jill Paton Walsh has said, ‘there are more people in the room. Writing for children involves the adult writer, and the child that writer once was; the present child reader, and the adult that child will become.’ Edith Nesbit, one of the greatest writers for children, was brilliantly attentive to this quartet. What she remembered clearly was childhood’s capacity for belief. At the moment when, in Five Children and It, the Psammead emerges from the sand, she comments: ‘It is wonderful how quickly you get used to things, even the most astonishing.’ In The Phoenix and the Carpet those same children find a

Thursday

Allan Mallinson

In praise of Thomas Graham, unsung hero of the Peninsular War

Why does a man join the army? The answer was probably more obvious in the 18th century than now, but in 1793 Thomas Graham was 45. The son of a Perthshire laird and of a daughter of the Earl of Hopetoun, and having inherited a good fortune, in 1774, he had married the beautiful Mary Cathcart, daughter of Baron Cathcart and of Jane Hamilton, herself the daughter of Lord Archibald Hamilton, all scions of Scots whiggery. It was evidently a love match. On the same day, Mary’s elder sister, Jane, had wed too. Their father wrote: ‘Jane has married, to please herself, John, Duke of Atholl, a peer of the

Clare Mulley

How Britain conned the US into entering the war

In June 1940, MI6’s new man, Bill Stephenson, ‘a figure of restless energy… wedged into the shell of a more watchful man’, sailed from Liverpool to New York on the MV Britannic. Once separated from its protective convoy, ‘this elegant, ageing liner was on its own’, Henry Hemming writes, noting that the same was true of Britain and ‘salvation for both lay in the New World’. Shortly after America entered the second world war in December 1941, a plane left for Britain carrying just a handful of passengers. Stephenson was among them. Over the intervening 18 months he had become Britain’s extraordinarily effective ‘Man in New York’. Not only did

Craig Raine

What made Lucian Freud so irresistible to women?

Amedeo Modigliani thought Nina Hamnett, muse, painter, memoirist, had ‘the best tits in Europe’. She fell 40 feet from a window and was impaled on the basement railings. Not suicide. She was peeing out of the window, the shared lodging-house lavatory being too distant. On her deathbed, her breathing was like a harmonica. The collector Roland Penrose liked being tied up by a dominatrix, a woman wrestler, whom he and his photographer wife, Lee Miller, brought to England and shared. The busy philosopher A. J. Ayer was known as Juan Don. When Isabel Rawsthorne finally had sex with the persistent, overweight sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, she reported that it was ‘exhausting’.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

A classic Bond villain

North Korea watchers are good book-buyers, rarely able to resist scratching that itch of interest caused by the world’s worst regime. Accounts by escapees sit on our shelves alongside the memoirs of anyone (Kim Jong-il’s sushi chef, for example) who has come into contact with the country or its leadership. Some books, such as Barbara Demick’s 2009 Nothing to Envy, break through to a wider audience. But the questions still need to be satisfied. What is the world’s most closed society like? What do its captive population actually believe? And who are the leaders of this communist monarchy? Through open source material, repeated travel to the country and first-hand interviews

Jesse Norman

Wrong but revered

Who was Walter Bagehot? For generations of politics students he has been the all-but-unpronounceable — Bayge-hot? Baggott? — author of the magisterial The English Constitution (1867). Since the 2008 crash he has enjoyed a vogue among central bankers for Lombard Street (1873), his brilliant anatomisation of the City of London. He remains the most revered, though not the first, editor of the Economist. The historian G.M. Young wrote in 1937 of him: We are looking for a man who was in and of his age… with sympathy to share and genius to judge… whose influence… can still impart, the most precious element in Victorian civilisation, its robust and masculine sanity.

Sarah Ditum

Grit and grace

The accepted story of mid-20th century culture in Britain belongs to the boys: the British Invasion, Beyond the Fringe and the Angry Young Men, with women relegated to bit parts. Celia Brayfield’s book is a corrective to that. She gathers seven young female writers who made their debuts in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and proposes them as a parallel clique to the Angries. Shelagh Delaney, Edna O’Brien, Lynne Reid Banks, Charlotte Bingham, Nell Dunn, Virginia Ironside and Margaret Forster never thought of themselves as a movement, but they ‘shared an inner place, the territory of girlhood,’ writes Brayfield. So far, so convincing — and her subjects have enough

Thursday

Peter Parker

Feasts and flowers

Cedric Morris is often referred to as an artist-plantsman, and while as a breeder of plants, most particularly of irises, he has always been highly regarded in horticultural circles, his reputation as a painter has been subject to regular fluctuations. Last year, two excellent and complementary London exhibitions — Cedric Morris: Artist Plantsman at the Garden Museum and Cedric Morris: Beyond the Garden  Wall at Philip Mould & Company — did a great deal to revive interest in his paintings; and so a joint biography of Morris and his partner Arthur Lett-Haines is welcome. They met in 1918 at an Armistice party hosted by Lett (as he was always known)

Thursday

David Crane

The Elder, the better

I couldn’t help thinking, as I read this book, of an old story, vaguely recalled from English A-level classes, about the poet and verse dramatist Gordon Bottomley. I can’t remember now which of his plays it concerns, but it must have been just after the notorious MP and swindler Horatio Bottomley had been imprisoned for fraud in 1922, because as the curtain fell on the final excruciating scene there was a shout from the audience: ‘My God, they’ve gaoled the wrong Bottomley!’ A reader is not going to get very far with Daisy Dunn’s new biography — the opening four lines, in fact — without a sinking sensation that the

Thursday

Mark Bostridge

The loveliest girl in Vienna

It must be rare for a popular song to have such a lasting influence on a posthumous reputation. However, this is the case with Tom Lehrer’s deliciously satirical tribute, ‘Alma’. Reading Alma Mahler’s obituary in 1964 — the ‘juiciest, spiciest, raciest’ he’d ever come across — Lehrer was amazed by her matrimonial CV and proceeded to immortalise it in a catchy lyric. Not only had Alma been married three times, to the composer Gustav Mahler, to Walter Gropius, the founder of Bauhaus, and, finally, to Franz Werfel, author of the runaway bestseller The Song of Bernadette, she’d also managed to bag as lovers some of the top creative men in

Thursday

Nicholas Shakespeare

The thoughts of Chairman Gonzalo

Few Peruvians today are interested in ‘the Shining Path years’, which left no traces besides 70,000 mutilated bodies and a wrecked country. Modern Lima, by and large, is a thriving city of five-star restaurants, shopping malls and newish Toyotas. Yet between 1980 and 1992 it was a vile and violent place, under siege from a revolutionary movement that modelled itself on Mao, Pol Pot and Enver Hoxha, and which venerated its leader as these men’s planetary heir. If anything, Sendero Luminoso was a precursor of Isis, with its child-suicide bombs, its rigid code of secrecy and its cultish devotion to a short, bearded, chubby figurehead who believed that ‘violence is

Thursday

Stephen Phillips

Writing that burns the eyes

Of how many magazine articles can you recall where you were and what you felt when you read them? If any occur, there’s a reliable chance John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima’ will figure among them, and not just because it will have been assigned at an impressionable age in school. For the first time in its history, the New Yorker cleared an entire issue in August 1946 to run the 30,000-word piece in full. In Mr Straight Arrow, his chronicle of Hersey’s career, the former Times Literary Supplement editor Jeremy Treglown relates an account of its reception among the international press corps in Rome — every one rapt, occupying their own cone

Thursday

Frances Wilson

The gifts of Gabo

Gerald Martin’s titanic biography of 2010, Gabriel García Márquez: A Life, was the product of 17 years of research and 300 interviews, including one with Fidel Castro. So what does Solitude & Company add to the fairytale history of ‘Gabo’, as Latin America’s greatest teller of historical fairy tales is generally known? In the year 2000, when García Márquez was still alive, Silvana Paternostro began conducting her own interviews with Gabo’s family, his ‘first and last friends’, his agents, editors and fellow writers. She has now cut, spliced and transcribed the tapes in order to create the effect of a bar full of drunks interrupting one another. ‘Is that tape