Tag: Biography

A new biography of Nehru by Stanley Wolpert has attracted scorn in New Delhi. Katherine Frank, who is herself writing a biography of Indira Gandhi, asks what we can learn from Wolpert's failures. If post-modern biography has liberated itself from…

Literary biography has expanded to take up the space vacated by fiction. But Kathryn Hughes, currently working on a life of George Eliot, fears that the genre's ability to unite academic specialists and educated generalists is threatened

Are leftists crazy or are they charlatans? After wading through 769 pages of Mikhail Gorbachev's humourless memoirs, PJ O'Rourke thinks he has the answer

Will Hutton on the visceral anti-Englishness that Andrew Neil shares with his former boss

Screen biographies, from Schindler's List to Gandhi, have swept the board at the Oscars. But, Christopher Tookey argues, four recent releases testify to the wretched state of the genre

Once authors used to write fiction. Now they are laying bare their intimate selves. Louise Kehoe, who has just written a book about her childhood, looks at the appeal of painfully revealing memoirs

After six volumes of letters and five volumes of diaries we know what Virginia Woolf did and said on almost every day of her life. Penelope Fitzgerald considers why we care

A definitive account of Albert Camus and tries to disentangle his fiction from his life

Frederic Raphael assesses the life of Bertrand Russell, the philosopher who, if he was close to being a genius, was even closer to being a shit

The latest book to come out of the Clinton administration is by the First Lady herself. It contains advice on entertaining toddlers (with a sock) and how girls should dress (comfortably). PJ O'Rourke wonders whether Mrs Clinton is really such…

Joseph Brodsky, the great poet-exile, never revisited his beloved Petersburg. But as Rachel Polonsky remembers, he recited Auden in Cambridge

Michael Portillo alienated all sides in the Tory leadership contest and then made a crass conference speech. Yet he remains a crown prince of the new Tory party. Bruce Anderson wonders whether he ought to be