Biography

Recalling being taken as a teenager on repeated outings to see Chatsworth, Roy Hattersley disarmingly confesses that in those days ‘I was impressed by neither the pictures nor the furniture’. Over the past three years, while working in the Chatsworth archives on this history of its owners, the Cavendish Dukes of Devonshire, Hattersley would break off from research to roam the rooms and reacquaint himself with the house’s treasures. Yet if he is now more appreciative of its contents, he is not completely under the spell of Chatsworth’s past occupants. The ‘founding mother’ of the Devonshire dynasty was the Tudor virago known as Bess of Hardwick. Aged 20 in 1549

Over 80 and almost blind, Diana Vreeland was wheeled around a forthcoming costume exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, issuing instructions all along the way about hats, shoes, lights and mannequins. She seemed, recalled the writer Andrew Solomon, an impossible old lady who couldn’t let go of her control and who was making everyone’s lives miserable for no good reason. And they did everything she’d said, and it was transformed. Her nearly sightless eyes could pick out things my youthful vision could not; enfeebled, she was still supreme at the discipline of chic. From childhood, Diana Vreeland had operated with deep faith in the power of self-presentation. She transformed herself from

Tate Modern promises that its forthcoming retrospective will showcase ‘the full scope of Roy Lichtenstein’s artistic explorations’, to which Spectator art critic Andrew Lambirth responded acidly: ‘I look forward to being pleasantly surprised.’ And it’s true that once Lichtenstein perfected his dot patterning technique in the mid-Sixties, he stuck with it until his death more than 30 years later. Alastair Sooke’s How Modern Art Was Saved By Donald Duck is available as a Penguin Specials paperback from Tate Modern; elsewhere, it’s in eBook format only. It won’t convince any sceptics of Lichtenstein’s infinite versatility, but it does make a case for him as a supreme examiner of style. ‘Perfected’ is

It was a placid start. A tubby kid with peroxide blond hair approached the crease in 6 easy steps. He skipped into the air and pulled his arms backwards to build forward momentum. His left leg hit the ground and he began to rotate his shoulders from right to left. This motion brought his right arm up through the air in a wide arc. He had to hold his left arm out in front of him for balance as the shoulder-turn accelerated. His hips began to follow in the direction of his shoulders, bringing his right flank around to the left. His right arm extended above his head and neared the

In the upper outer corridor of the Summer Palace, with its views of the palm fringed courtyard below, the young man was waiting with his gun. It was a no frills 7.65 Ruby automatic pistol, one of thousands a Spanish small arms manufacturer had supplied the French Army during the First World. Some of the offices along the narrow corridor were already deserted for the holiday. Nonetheless he had been assured that, however long his Christmas Eve lunch, the admiral would be back because he would want to read his latest telegrams. At about 3.30pm he heard footsteps, the murmur of voices then, rather surprisingly perhaps, laughter. The assassination of

In December 1936, following the Abdication of Edward VIII, a rhyme circulated about the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang: ‘My Lord Archbishop, what a scold you are! And when your man is down, how bold you are! Of Christian charity how scant you are! And, auld Lang swine, how full of cant you are!’ Lang had made a particularly ill-judged broadcast three days after the Abdication, which caused considerable offence. The widespread view of Lang is that he impotently wrung his hands on the sidelines before the Abdication, after which he made his disastrous broadcast. A different view was taken by the Duke of Windsor in his memoirs: ‘Behind [the

The joke has been made by Jack Stillinger, an American editor of Keats, that there have been so many treatments of the poet’s life that we know him better than his contemporaries did, and better than most people we see every day. This brilliant new biography by eminent Keatsian Nicholas Roe has caused controversy with the claim that Keats was an opium addict. The book’s blurb is certainly angled to capitalise on this, and states that it will ‘[explode] entrenched conceptions of [Keats] as a delicate, overly sensitive, tragic figure.’ But surely, one would think, Keats being a drug addict on top of the tuberculosis and early death should enlarge

It is lit-fiction season: that time of the year of when the premier novelists of the age dominate the market. Ian McEwan, Pat Barker, Zadie Smith, Sebastian Faulks and Rose Tremain all have new books out, and Salman Rushdie’s much anticipated memoirs are to be launched this week, so many newspapers are devoting themselves to regurgitating stale observations about The Satanic Verses ahead of the main and keenly guarded event. Of the new books, Zadie Smith’s NW is garnering the most plaudits, or at least that seems to be the case. Philip Hensher awarded the ‘rich and varied’ book 5 stars in his Telegraph review, marking the ‘virtuosity of Smith’s technique’

In celebration of the birthday of Dorothy Parker (1893 – 1967) today, here’s a review from the archives of her biography The Late Dorothy Parker by Leslie Frewin.   Where be your gibes now?, Victoria Glendinning, 12 Sep 1987 Dorothy Parker was ‘America’s wittiest woman’. Here is an example of her wit. Rising from her chair at the Algonquin, she said: ‘Excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom . . . I really have to telephone but I’m too embarrassed to say so.’ I think that’s funny. Do you think it’s funny? Generally, she was funny at other people’s expense, and it hurt. Born in 1893, she was a Rothschild

It is easy to forget that the dignified eighteenth-century gentleman whose image appears on the one-dollar bill, the first President and father of his nation, owed his position entirely to his prowess as a soldier. Stephen Brumwell’s book charts the two phases of his military career, firstly fighting for King George II, then fighting against King George III. George Washington was born into a landowning family in Virginia and was expected to become a gentleman planter like his forebears. But the appeal of adventure on the frontier drew him to enlist – with no formal military training ‒ as a militia officer. Five years of tough campaigning followed, defending the

One of the puns that circulated the cultured elite of Italy during the Renaissance compared the potency of an artist’s paintbrush, his pennello, with his penis, il pene. Raphael, who by all accounts liked his women, perhaps embodied that duality best of all. The artist’s fascination with female kind, Antonio Forcellino suggests in his brilliant and lyrical biography of the artist, helped shape his genius. Not long before Raphael died, aged just 37, of a malady popularly believed to have stemmed from excessive sexual activity, he painted La Fornarina — a young, brown-eyed beauty (perhaps his last lover), semi-nude but for a diaphanous veil draped beneath her décolletage. Around this

Francis Elliott and James Hanning’s latest update on all things Cameron, Cameron: Practically a Conservative, is a masterclass of painstaking research, balance and a great store of anecdotage. Is he the slick PR man with more U-turns than a military lavatory block? Is he a ruthless and arrogant privileged bully? Or is he unimaginative and rather pedestrian in thought and deed? Or is he a prisoner of a hunting, shooting and country house upbringing? If you want to get the beginnings of how to understand what makes Cameron tick, you should read this book. Even if you would prefer that his political corpse was found mangled under a number 11

‘Not one word’, exclaimed Turgenev of Tolstoy, ‘not one movement of his is natural! He is eternally posing before us!’ The recurrent underlying theme of A.N. Wilson’s prize-winning biography of Tolstoy, now re-issued after a quarter of a century, is the novelist as grand impersonator. Wilson (a prolific novelist himself) believes that there is a strong impulse in novelists to don masks or test alter egos, and that this impulse rioted in Tolstoy’s character. Throughout his long life Tolstoy switched between playing at sad orphan, landowner, libertine, crazed gambler, spiritual elder, holy fool, paterfamilias, historian, village idiot, cobbler and dissident. Sometimes he postured as a bearded prophet, doling out portentous