The biographer’s tale
In 1994 I asked Roy Jenkins if I could write his biography. By the time he finally agreed, three years later, he was about to embark on his Churchill biography and I was about to start working for Tony Blair.…
Tag: Biography
The curse of Henry James
The spate of novels about Henry James seems odd even to Michiel Heyns, who wrote one of them. But to reclaim a principle of mastery, novelists seem willing to violate a life
A transcendent introvert
Drawn inwards by both his insular upbringing and his genius, Glenn Gould's life was almost devoid of incident. This is what makes it fascinating
Modernism’s suicide
Why is the realist novelist Jonathan Coe so taken by the life of experimentalist BS Johnson?
The mother of child benefit
A long overdue biography of Eleanor Rathbone
The Shostakovich files
The debate over Shostakovich's "collusion" is inconclusive; the music is not
By Hooke or by crook
In resurrecting Robert Hooke, Lisa Jardine has created her own optical illusion
An Irishman in full
Roy Foster has shaped Yeats's life and verse into a history, rather than just a biography
Previous convictions
The fetishisation of history
Last of the magicians
Every era views Isaac Newton through the prism of its own concerns. That's why we're obsessed with his alchemy
George at 100
The last job for Orwell biographers is to examine his faults and catalogue his enemies. But it only serves to confirm his virtues
The shadows of Suez
Suez cast a long shadow over Anthony Eden's political career. But the crisis left surprisingly little transatlantic or cross-channel rancour, says Philip Goodhart
Interviewing the interviewer
Janet Malcolm once wrote about the duplicitous relationship of journalists to their subjects. Elena Lappin talked to Malcolm, less about her Chekhov book than herself
Death by naturalism
How close can fiction come to describing reality? The British author BS Johnson embarked on a quest for absolute literary naturalism which ended in his suicide.
Lives of the mind
What explains the recent fashion for biographies of philosophers? Why do so few of them combine both good philosophy and vivid writing?
Hacking up the Victorians
Lytton Strachey bent the rules and even the facts. But he still defines the liberties a biographer can take with a life in service of the truth
Clara Schumann’s double life
Janice Galloway reclaims a life and the biographical novel
The definitive Dostoevsky
Joseph Frank has completed his five-volume biography of the Russian genius
Ancestor worship
Genealogy is now more popular than pornography. What does that say about us?
Levi’s inferno
As German Jews held to the culture of Goethe, so Primo Levi summoned Dante in Auschwitz. His struggle was with literature as well as testimony