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[[Category:New Reviews|Biography]]__NOTOC__<!-- Remove INSERT NEW REVIEWS BELOW HERE-->{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Jerry Oppenheimer1788360702|title=Crazy RichCharles, The Alternative Prince: Power, Scandal and Tragedy Inside the Johnson & Johnson DynastyAn Unauthorised Biography|author=Edzard Ernst|rating=34

|summary=Back in 1885 three brothers were inspired by a speech by Joseph ListerFor over forty years, the pioneer Prince Charles has been an ardent supporter of antiseptic surgery, to create a range of surgical dressings - such things were previously unheard of - and this was the beginning of Johnson & Johnson, providers of Band-Aids alternative medicine and baby powdercomplementary therapies. It also brought phenomenal wealth to ''Charles, The Alternative Prince'' critically assesses the founders Prince's opinions, beliefs and a variety of trusts continued this down aims against the years. The first president background of the company was Robert Wood Johnsonscientific evidence. NFL fans will be aware There are few instances of his great grandson, Robert Wood Johnson IV (known as 'Woody'), owner of the New York Jets. In between the two - beliefs being vindicated and afterwards - there are a string his relentless promotion of tragedies and scandals treatments which put you in mind of have no scientific support has done considerable damage to the Kennedy dynasty.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0312662114</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|title=America's Mistress: The Life and Times reputation of Eartha Kitt|author=John L Williams|rating=4|genre=Entertainment|summary=Two quotes on the back a man who is proud of the dust jacket testify his refusal to the power and public perception of Eartha Kitt during her lifetime. Orson Welles once called her ‘the most exciting woman in the world’apply evidence-based, while logical reasoning to the CIA she was ‘a sadistic nymphomaniac’his ambitions.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857385755</amazonuk>

 {{newreview|title=Inferno Decoded: The essential companion to the myths, mysteries and locations of Dan Brown's InfernoFrontpage|authorisbn=Michael Haag1739805100|rating=4|genre=Entertainment|summarytitle=Here be spoilers. Not so much in my review, but certainly in its subject, a very quickly produced companion guide to Loving the latest [[Enemy:Category:Dan Brown|Dan Brown]] blockbuster. It's not so much Building bridges in a page-by-page guide, but certainly serves as an educational and intelligent look at the background to the biggest-selling book time of 2013.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1781251800</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|title=Serving Victoria: Life in the Royal Householdwar|author=Kate HubbardAndrew March

|summary=Biographies old and new ''Loving the Enemy'' tells the quite extraordinary story of Queen Victoriaauthor Andrew March's grandparents, her husband and her children are plentiful enough. The vast majority who first met when grandfather Fred Clayton went to Dresden to teach in the early days of them are based to some extent on the diariesNazi regime in the 1930s. Fred, memoirs a sensitive and biographies of thoughtful man, had some vague ideas of "building bridges" which may guard against the most important figures who served her, and Kate Hubbard has put these as well as supplementary archive papers to good use growing hostilities between nations unfolding in presenting a thoroughly engrossing account of Europe at the royal household throughout the Queen’s lengthy reigntime. I might almost say ‘lively’, though Fred's attempts to separate individual people from ideology weren't universally successful but he did make friendships and connections that could be an exaggeration. The court of Victoria may have been homely after lasted for a fashion, but for the most part it was hardly livelylifetime.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099532239</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Robert SellersWill Brooker|title=What Fresh Lunacy is This?: The Authorised Biography of Oliver ReedTruth About Lisa Jewell

|summary=For rather more Meet [[:Category:Lisa Jewell|Lisa Jewell]], one of his career than hethe most successful British authors I've never knowingly read. Now meet Will Brooker, his family and closest friends might one of the thousands of less successful authors I quite confidently never have likedread. This book starts with the two meeting each other, as well, and shows how 2021 drew the name Oliver Reed was a byword for booze, brawls two closer and all types of laddish behaviourcloser together. As Sellers’ very full and remarkably objective biography revealsThe meeting was some unspecified combination, it seems, of her anecdote about cup cakes, the words of her latest book she was reciting, and her being in a ''black lace mini-dress with gold brocade'' (certainly a funny yet sad life all get-up never commonly worn at oncethe author events I get to attend), but pulled Brooker, a professor of cultural studies who has swallowed Roland Barthes, down the rabbit-hole that is Jewell's diverse output. For although Brooker decides he repeatedly played up 'd like nothing more than to follow her through a year in the image published author's life, working to make a success of the lovable rogue which he had createdlatest title, underneath and struggling with the bad boy of popular legend he was at heart a professional actor who could always deliver a first-rate performance on next in line. Jewell, due diligence appropriately done, agrees. And this is the film set when requiredresult.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>147210112X</amazonuk>1529136024

 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Neal ThompsonMartha Leigh|title=Invisible Ink: A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert 'Believe It or Not' Ripley Family Memoir|rating=45|genre=Biography|summary=Robert LeRoy Ripley was indeed Martha Leigh begins her book talking about a childhood spent in a curious manslightly eccentric, immediately recognisable upper middle class English family. He throve Her father is a Cambridge don, forever clacking away on curiosity, his own and that of everyone else. By exploiting and never underestimating the public demand for trivia, and by being in the right place at the right time just typewriter as the news and broadcasting media were beginning to develop in America into the unassailable forces they were by the end of the century, he became one of edits the most successful men complete correspondence of the age.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847947204</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Hermione Lee|title=Edith Wharton|rating=4|genre=Biography|summary=A prolific authorphilosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Edith Whartonhis life's published output included over twenty novels, one work. Her mother is a Pulitzer Prize winner, and 85 short stories, as well as poetry and books on interior design and travelconcert pianist who practises for hours every day. Born Neither parent is hugely interested in the United States in 1862, she travelled extensively throughout Europe, and settled permanently in France where she died in 1937.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1845952014</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Sylvie Simmons|title=I'm Your Man: The Life practicalities of Leonard Cohen|rating=4life.5|genre=Biography|summary=If you or I wanted to write a story about an imaginary figure who began as a novelist and poet, then became acclaimed as a singer-songwriter There is love in the swinging sixties, made and lost a fortune, became a monk, and returned to house but also darker undercurrents that a musical career at an age when most mortals are well into retirement, and found himself child does not only more popular than ever fully understand but also playing to the largest audiences in his entire life, it would be dismissed as total fantasy. Nobody could make it up – and nobody needs to, because in a nutshell that knows is the life (so far) of Leonard Cohen, the subject of this biography and surely one of the music business’s most unique figuresthere.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099549328</amazonuk>1800460384

 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=J C KannemeyerPolly Barton|title=J.M. Coetzee: A life in writingFifty Sounds

|genre=BiographyPolitics and Society|summary=J.M. (John Maxwell) Coetzee is described as probably Where do I start? I could start with where Barton herself starts, with the most celebrated and decorated writer throughout the English-speaking world. The author of sixteen published novels, he question ''Why Japan?'' Japan has been awarded the Nobel Prize on my radar for Literature a while and if the Booker Prize twiceworld hadn't gone into melt-down I would have visited by now. At the same time he has guarded his privacy jealouslyI may get there later this year, tending to decline interviews and requests to discuss his workbut I am not hopeful. And like Barton, and refusing I don't know the answer to collect prestigious awards the question ''why Japan?'' She explains her feelings in respect of the question in person. On one occasion he explained his absence by saying that he could not imagine the first essay, which is on the sound ''giro' 'anything better calculated to reduce me to misery'. One acquaintance claims to have attended several dinner parties at – which she describes as being, among other things, the author was a fellow guest and did not utter a single wordsound of ''every party where you have to introduce yourself''.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1922070084</amazonuk>1913097501

 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Vladimir AlexandrovFrederic Gros|title=The Black RussianA Philosophy of Walking

|genre=BiographyPolitics and Society|summary=Until I read confess I picked this book one up from the library in my pre-lockdown forage of random stuff. Now I have to go out an buy my own copy so that I can turn down the pages I have marked and return to its varying wisdom when I need to. Some books draw you in slowly. This one had never come across me in the story of Frederick Bruce Thomasfirst two pages, wherein Gros explains why 'the Black Russian', before. It walking is not a remarkable tale of rags to riches, tragedy, success against the odds and subsequent failuresport''.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1781855196</amazonuk>1781688370

 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Lucy MooreSharon Blackie|title=NijinskyIf Women Rose Rooted|rating=4.5|genre=Biography|summary=The name Nijinsky I normally say that you can tell how much a book means to me by how many pages have corners turned down. Perhaps an even greater measure of impact is synonymous with dance from setting out to buy my own copy before I've finished reading the last days of imperial Russiaone I've borrowed. I must confess want to knowing little avoid clichés like 'powerful' 'inspiring' 'life-changing' – although it is definitely the first two and only time will tell about him until I read this, the first biography of him third – but clichés exist for nearly forty years, a reason and for me I'm not sure I can succinctly put it was a surprise to learn that his career was so tragically briefany better.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1846686180</amazonuk>1912836017

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Diana Souhami0241446732|title=The Trials of Radclyffe Hall|rating=4|genre=Biography|summary=It Our House is a coincidence that the year 1928 saw the first appearance of two English novels which were denounced and initially suppressed on the grounds of obscenity and their potential to corrupt innocent readers – D.H. Lawrence’s 'Lady Chatterley’s Lover' and Radclyffe Hall's 'The Well of Loneliness'. Lawrence's many novels, stories and poems are widely read today, but Hall and her works are hardly remembered except by a minority. Diana Souhami has done her a service in this generous yet deeply probing life Fire: Scenes of a literary trailblazer.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1780878788</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Diana Souhami|title=Greta and Cecil|rating=4|genre=Biography|summary=The story of the notoriously reclusive film star from Sweden and the noted British photographer is a curious one. Neither ever married, both were androgynous and bisexual, plucked their eyebrows, and had numerous short-term relationships. They were like chalk Family and cheese; Beaton was a compulsive writer and diarist, while Garbo was reluctant to pick up a pen even to sign her own name. He adored parties, publicity, dressing up in frocks and photographing himself or posing for others behind the lens (he couldn’t look more feminine in two pictures of him in frocks by Dorothy Wilding from 1925 if he tried), while she was very much an early bed at night person, preferred to wear unfussy men’s clothes, and was reluctant to be photographed at all if she could help it. It is significant that the one picture of them together in the book, taken in London Planet in 1951, shows her deliberately hiding her face behind what looks like a handbag.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1780878869</amazonuk>}} {{newreviewCrisis|author=Diana Souhami|title=Natalie and Romaine|rating=3|genre=Biography|summary=The main focus of the book is the relationship between Natalie Barney and Romaine BrooksMalena Ernman, two very well-off American lesbians who first met in Paris when the former was 39 and the latter 41. It was the beginning of an often mercurial partnership which lasted for fifty years. However, despite the author’s insistenceGreta Thunberg, it is less a double biography than a survey of the Sapphic society life which centred on Paris for much of this period. Barney, a poet, was a flamboyant character who used to say that 'living was the first of all the arts' Beata Thunberg and often vowed to make 'my life itself into a poem'. Brooks, a painter whose self-portrait adorns the front cover, was the product of a difficult childhood, abused by her mother who far preferred her mentally unbalanced brother, often proclaimed sadly that 'my dead mother stands between me and life'. An aloof soul, she made a brief marriage with the homosexual John Ellingham Brooks but left him within a year.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1780878826</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Thomas Wright|title=Circulation: William Harvey's Revolutionary IdeaSvante Thunberg

|genre=BiographyPolitics and Society|summary='Circulation' by Thomas Wright is a biography of English physician William Harvey’s life, The Ernman / Thunberg family seemed perfectly normal. Malena Ernman was an opera singer and the story Svante Thunberg took on most of the 'birth parenting of a theory'their two daughters. It takes the reader through time before, during Then eleven-year-old Greta stopped eating and after the creation talking and completion of ''De Motu Cordis''her sister, Beata, then nine years old, struggled with what was happening. In such circumstances, in which Harvey famously outlines the most comprehensive antecedent of the mechanism of blood circulation as we know it today. The combination of the writer's aptitude for storytelling and the intriguing life of the individual about whom he writes makes for natural to seek a fascinating readsolution close to home, allowing one but eventually, it became clear to course through chronologically arranged chapters the family that they were ''burned-out people on Harvey’s life and works, mixed with briefer essays on subject matters ranging from the history of vivisection a burned-out planet''. If they were to find a way to live happily again their solution would need to the philosophical underpinnings of Harvey’s workbe radical.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099552698</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Simon Morrison0648684806|title=The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev|rating=4.5|genre=Biography|summary=This book is a biography of and based largely on the letters of Lina Prokofiev. Born Carlina Codina in Madrid in 1897, she spent most of her childhood in New York. After making her stage debut as a soprano in Verdi’s ‘Rigoletto’ under the name of Lina Llubera, she met the Soviet composer and pianist Serge Prokofiev, best remembered for the children’s musical fable ‘Peter and the Wolf’. They married in 1924 and for the first thirteen years of their marriage they lived in Paris, where two sons, Oleg and Svyatoslav, were born to them. Soon after moving to Moscow in 1936 their marriage fell apart. In 1941 he left her for a writer, Mira Mendelson, 24 years his junior, whom he married six years later.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846557313</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev|title=Giants: The Dwarfs of AuschwitzClara Colby: The Extraordinary Story of the Lilliput Troupe|rating=4.5|genre=Biography|summary=The title of this book does of course carry a sense of irony, although we never quite know exactly how much. When a man of diminutive stature was born in rural Romania in the 1860s nobody was to know what would happen to his lineage – there was no clue then that he would father ten children, and seven of them would inherit his genetic dwarfism. But history has pieced together all that followed, including the careers those children had as a performance troupe, belting out showtunes to their own accompaniment, and acting in their own tragi-comic skits. And then having the limelight stolen from them by the Nazis, and a transportation to Auschwitz. And then being surprisingly saved, and given what passed as a cushty life, fed and together, but tortured at the hands of the camp doctor, avidly researching anything he thought might shed clues on what singled out his Aryan race's genetic destiny. I say the amount of irony is unknown because we are not told exactly how short these little characters are – but he, the doctor, would have known. As one of the more ominous sentences you'll read all year has it – 'Mengele had plans for them'.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849544646</amazonuk>}} {{newreviewInternational Suffragist|author=Peter Ackroyd|title=Wilkie CollinsJohn Holliday

|summary=While Peter Ackroyd has published some extremely long books over The path of Clara Dorothy Bewick's life was probably determined when her family emigrated to the USA. At the last few time she was just three-years-old but because of some childhood ailment, he has also been responsible for some commendably concise volumes as wellshe wasn't allowed to sail with her parents and three brothers. This life Instead, she remained with her grandparents, who doted on her and saw that she received a good education, both in and out of school. She was the Victorian novelist is one only child in the household and her childhood was glorious. By contrast, her family had become pioneer farmers in the mid-west of the latterUnited States and life was hard, as Clara was to find out when she and her grandparents eventually went to join the latest in his series of 'Brief Lives'family. Clara would only know her mother for a few months: she was married for fifteen years, which have also included Chaucerhad ten pregnancies, seven surviving children and died in childbirth not long after Clara arrived. As the painter Turner eldest girl, a heavy burden would fall on Clara and [[Poe by Peter Ackroyd|Edgar Allan Poe]]Wisconsin was a rude awakening.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099287471</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Gary Raymond1789017977|title=3-Minute JRR TolkienRonnie and Hilda's Romance: A Visual Biography of The Towards a New Life after World's Most Revered Fantasy WriterWar II|author=Wendy Williams

|genre=BiographyHistory|summary=When something with such a built-in cult base Ronnie Williams was the son of Thomas Henry Williams (known as Tolkien books have gets transported into another medium, the manically interested fans have two reactions – to initially scoff at how nothing could compare with the original, Harry) and then Ethel Wall. There's some doubt as to try and buy everything worthwhile with whether or not they were ever married or even a tenuous link Harry's birthdate: he claimed to the object of their affectionshave been born in 1863, while avoiding the mountain of crud that could deluge the unwarybut he was already many years older than Ethel and he might well have shaved a few years off his age. Such it will be until the third movie part of ''The Hobbit'' is safely behind usFor a while, and the sixfamily was quite well-film, three-month long Bluto-Ray box set is on the shelves. Tolkien enthusiasts of course have a precarious situation – so great do they rightly hold but disaster struck in the originals, 1929 Depression and so low can the quality of the spinfive-year-offs be, there are some who will never be satisfiedold Ronnie had to adjust to a very different lifestyle. But there remains the newcomer, freshly inspired One thing he did inherit from his father was his need to find be well-turned-out more, and those this would stay with him throughout his life. He joined the army at least will certainly be able to enjoy this beginner's guide to [[:Category:J R R Tolkien|J R R Tolkien]]eighteen in 1942.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1908005831</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=John FisherPatti Smith|title=Tommy Cooper 'Jus' Like That!': A Life in Jokes and PicturesYear of the Monkey

|summary=I grew up watching Tommy CooperOn the coast of Santa Cruz, and watching my dad do impressions Patti Smith enters the lunar year of Tommy Cooper. I thought he was hilarious (the real Tommy!) monkey - one packed with mischief, sorrow, and loved his expressions as he repeatedly tried and failed to do magic tricks! This book unexpected moments. In a stranger's words, ''Anything is rather unusual as although possible: after all, it is a biography of sorts, giving information about Tommy's life and his history in the world year of entertainment, it isnthe monkey''t text heavy. As Smith wanders the coast of Santa Cruz in solitude, she reflects on a year that brings huge shifts in her life - loss and so mostly Tommy's story is told through photographs and picturesageing are faced head-on, as it the shifting political waters in America.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>184809311X</amazonuk>1526614758

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Peter Unwin (editor)1912242052|title=Newcomers' Lives: The Story of Immigrants as Told in Obituaries from The TimesO Joy for me!|author=Keir Davidson|rating=4.53|genre=BiographyArt|summary=I think I was not ''Oh Joy for me!'' gives Coleridge credit for being ''the only first person who at first glance found to walk the title mountains alone, not because he had to for work, as a miner, quarryman, shepherd or pack-horse driver, but because he wanted to for pleasure and sub-title slightly misleadingadventure. For me it conjured up visions of those who came across on the ‘Windrush’ in 1948 and the life they led on settling in Britain – His rapturous encounters with their natural beauty, andits literary consequences, perhaps, the lives changed our view of the more famous (assuming there were some) in obituary formworld''.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1441159177</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Artemis CooperGraff_Find|title=Patrick Leigh Fermor: An AdventureFind Another Place|author=Ben Graff|rating=43.5|genre=BiographyAutobiography|summary=The sub-title When Ben Graff's grandfather Martin handed him a plastic folder of this biography is highly appropriatehandwritten notes from his journal, for he didn't take much notice of it. At the ninety-six years age of Patrick Leigh Fermor were packed with adventure. Born in 191524, Graff didn't realise the gravity of the pages he was something of a maverick at school, intellectually gifted but perpetually naughty, and his punishments for various refractions included suspensions and even expulsionsholding.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0719554497</amazonuk>

{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Selina Guinness1789016304|title=The Crocodile by the DoorWar and Love: The Story A family's testament of a Houseanguish, a Farm endurance and a Familydevotion in occupied Amsterdam|author=Melanie Martin

|summary=Selina Guinness lived at Tibradden as a child Melanie Martin read about what happened to Dutch Jews in occupied Amsterdam during World War II and in 2002 was entranced by what she and her husband-to-bediscovered, Colin Graham, moved back to the house when particularly in ''The Diary of Ann Frank'' but then realised that her elderly uncle Charles became frailown family's stories were equally fascinating. The surname might lead you to suspect that there A hundred and seven thousand Jews were brewery millions in deported from the city during the background war years, but only five thousand survived and Martin could not understand how this wasn't the casecould be allowed to happen in a country with liberal values who were resistant to German occupation. The couple Most people believed that the occupation could never happen: even those who thought that the Germans might reach the city were young academics and doing what needed to convinced that they would soon be done at Tibradden pushed back, that the Amsterdammers would need never allow what happened to be done escalate in addition to full-time jobsthe way that it did, but initial protests melted away as the organisers became more circumspect. The house was It's an atrocity on the outskirts a vast scale but made up of tens of thousands of Dublin - 'derelict fields' if you were a property developer or the last defence against the encroaching city if you were notindividual tragedies.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1844881571</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Harry Ricketts1786893452|title=Strange Meetings: The Lives of the Poets of the Great WarUngrateful Refugee|author=Dina Nayeri

|summary=The majority of recent books on Here in the War Poets tend to focus West, we see news reports about immigrants on their lives during a regular basis – some media welcoming them, some scaremongering about them. But all of those stories are written by journalists – almost always western, and immediately after almost always, no matter how deep the conflict. This enterprising accountinvestigative journalism they carry out, borrowing its name from outsiders to the world and the poem by Wilfred Owen, takes a different approach situations that refugees find themselves in spanning a full fifty years or more. It begins with 's rare that we find out the journeys from the first meeting of Siegfried Sassoon refugees themselves – and Rupert Brooke at one of Eddie Marsh’s breakfasts in July 1914. Marsh was this is a tireless supporter of modern painters and after rare opportunity to do that promising new writers, particularly poets. The journeyin this intelligent, or rather account powerful and moving work by Dina Nayeri -someone who was born in the middle of meetingsa revolution in Iran, takes us fleeing to the western front and back to England, culminating in America as a reunion of two of the longestten-year-lived, Sassoon and David Jones, in 1964old.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1845951808</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Simon Callow0857058320|title=Charles Laughton: A Difficult ActorLord Of All the Dead|author=Javier Cercas and Anne McLean (translator)|rating=4.5

|summary=Once ''Lord Of All the Dead'' is a towering presence on stage and screen, journey to uncover the star of fifty films author's lost ancestor's life and forty plays, Charles Laughton seems largely forgotten these daysdeath. As an actor of a younger generation and keen admirer of Cercas is searching for the meaning behind his workgreat uncle's death in the Spanish Civil War. Manuel Mena, Cercas' great uncle, Callow is well placed to bring him back to the forefigure who looms large over the book. He notes in died relatively young whilst fighting for Francisco Franco's forces. Cercas ruminates on why his preface that uncle fought for this dictator. The question at the man has increasingly slipped out centre of public consciousness, and even within this book is whether it is possible for his own profession he is virtually unknown great uncle to anybody under be a hero whilst having fought for the age of forty|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099581957</amazonuk>wrong side.

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=John Sugden1788037812|title=NelsonThe Fraternity of the Estranged: A Dream of GloryThe Fight for Homosexual Rights in England, 1891-1908|author=Brian Anderson

|summary=I will admit Originally passed in 1885, the law that I didn't know what I was letting myself had made homosexual relations a crime remained in place for when I saw 'Nelson82 years. But during this time, restrictions on same-sex relationships did not go unchallenged. Between 1891 and 1908, three books on the nature of homosexuality appeared. They were written by two homosexual men: A Dream Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds, as well as the heterosexual Havelock Ellis. Exploring the margins of Glory' sitting society and studying homosexuality was common on the Bookbag shelfEuropean Continent, but I had just come back from Portsmouth barely talked about in the UK, so the publications of these men were hugely significant – contributing to the scientific understanding of homosexuality, and a wander around on beginning the Victorystruggle for recognition and equality, so it was a bit hard leading to resistthe milestone legalisation of same-sex relationships in 1967. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>1845951913</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Kate ChisholmBuckland_Zoo|title=Wits and WivesThe Man Who Ate the Zoo: Dr Johnson in the Company Frank Buckland, forgotten hero of Womennatural history|author=Richard Girling|rating=4.5

|summary=What's your mental image of As a Great Writer? Most people would probably say conservationist in Victorian England before the same thing: someone sitting in splendid isolationterm existed, probably in Frank Buckland was very much a garret, writing Great Words and hating themman ahead of his time. The idea of Great Writers having friendsSurgeon, or even a familynaturalist, is a bizarre one. Partly this is because most Great Writers were incredibly weird people. But there's another issue at play. We're simply not used to imagining them in contextveterinarian and eccentric sums him up perfectly, just one small part of a large and busy world. Our notion of biography is an incredibly fragmented one: despite the fact that one of the best indications of someone's character any biographer is how they interact immediately presented with other human beings, we expect biographers to essentially confine themselves a colourful tale to the person and their literary outputtell.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1845951867</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Frances A GerardWilliams_Captain|title=Anna AmaliaCaptain Ronald Campbell of Bombala Station, Grand DuchessCambalong: Patron of Goethe His Military Life and SchillerTimes|author=Ivor George Williams

|summary=Anna Amalia In March 1829 Ann Parker married Captain J A Edwards of Brunswick, a Duchess the 17th Regiment of Saxe-Weimar Eisenach Foot. He was in command of the eighteenth centurytroops and convicts on board a ship sailing from Plymouth to Sydney, is scarcely little more than a footnote in European royal history these daysAustralia: his wife and young son accompanied him. Nevertheless it He was mainly through her patronage that not destined to live a long life, dying suddenly at the court of Weimar became one of the most artistically renowned age of the time34 at Bangalore, leaving his widow to raise their two young sons. Edwards' death left his widow in a reputation it never lost throughout difficult position: not only did she have their farm to manage, but she was also responsible for the increasingly militaristic times that Germany went through from convicts who worked the age of Bismarck and beyondland. Two years later she would marry Captain Ronald Campbell.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1781550166</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Adrian FortPeacock_mountain|title=Nancy: Into The Story Mountain, A Life of Lady AstorNan Shepherd|author=Charlotte Peacock|rating=4.5

|summary=NancyMostly we choose what books to read because there is so little time and so many books… I can understand the approach, Lady Astorbut I also think we sell ourselves short by it, and we sell the first woman to take her seat myriad lesser-known authors short as an elected Member of Parliament at Westminsterwell. So while, like most other people I have my favourite genres, is one of those characters about whom it is surely impossible for anyone to write a dull biography. A determined character who inspired admirationand favoured authors, respect and exasperation in equal measure from while, like most if not all who had dealings with herother people I read the reviews and follow up on what appeals, she is well served by this latest in I also have a long line of titles devoted third-string to hermy reading bow: randomness.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>022409016X</amazonuk>