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[[Category:New Reviews|Biography]]__NOTOC__<!-- Remove INSERT NEW REVIEWS BELOW HERE-->{{newreviewFrontpage|isbn=1788360702|title=Empress Dowager CixiCharles, The Alternative Prince: An Unauthorised Biography|author=Jung ChangEdzard Ernst|rating=54

|summary=It’s easy to see why Jung Chang selected Cixi as the focal point for her study For over forty years, Prince Charles has been an ardent supporter of China’s tumultuous modern historyalternative medicine and complementary therapies. Cixi is a truly fascinating woman ''Charles, The Alternative Prince'' critically assesses the Prince's opinions, one beliefs and aims against the background of the scientific evidence. There are few human beings whose existence can be honestly said instances of his beliefs being vindicated and his relentless promotion of treatments which have no scientific support has done considerable damage to have shaped the course reputation of history. Cixi’s biography a man who is not only a fascinating read due to her own political machinations, but also because of the immense transformations that occurred in China during her lifetime. Jung Chang offers a detailed exploration proud of the period from Cixi’s entrance to court in 1852 his refusal to her death in 1908apply evidence-based, during which time the ancient dynastic customs of China gave way logical reasoning to the advent of the industrial agehis ambitions.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224087436</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|isbn=1739805100|title=BertieLoving the Enemy: A Life Building bridges in a time of Edward VIIwar|author=Jane RidleyAndrew March|rating=4.5

|summary=Several of ''Loving the main facts about King Edward VII (1841-1910) are reasonably well-known. Considered oversexed by his parents, Queen Victoria and Enemy'' tells the Prince Consortquite extraordinary story of author Andrew March's grandparents, he was blamed by the former for breaking who first met when grandfather Fred Clayton went to Dresden to teach in the latter's heart and causing his early death with days of the news that he (Edward) had enjoyed himself with a lady of Nazi regime in the night1930s. He was notoriously unfaithful to his charming but prematurely deaf and lame wife AlexandraFred, hated reading books and learning but became a first-class unofficial ambassador to courts sensitive and countries abroadthoughtful man, and despite low expectations had some vague ideas of others "building bridges" which may guard against the growing hostilities between nations unfolding in Europe at the time. Fred's attempts to separate individual people from ideology weren't universally successful but he did make friendships and poor health he made an excellent King connections that lasted for the last nine years of his lifea lifetime.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099575442</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Anthony SummersWill Brooker|title=Not In Your Lifetime: The Assassination of JFK|rating=4.5|genre=True Crime|summary=Originally published as ''The Kennedy Conspiracy'', Anthony Summers has massively revised the text, updated it with the latest evidence and it's been republished as ''Not in Your Lifetime: The Assassination of JFK'' which refers to the statement made by Chief Justice Earl Warren who was asked if the truth about what happened would come out. He said that it would, but added the rider that ''it might not be in your lifetime''. Fifty years on most of the people directly involved are now dead, but the truth has not officially emerged. In fact, it's difficult to avoid the thought that the US government would prefer that it did not see the light of day. Further documents are due to be released in 2017, but, in the meantime Anthony Summer has examined what is available, investigated on his own behalf and given us this comprehensive book.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755365429</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|title=The Assassination of the Archduke: Sarajevo 1914 and the Murder That Changed the World|author=Greg King and Sue WoolmansTruth About Lisa Jewell

|summary=Possibly no assassination in history can have had such momentous consequences for Meet [[:Category:Lisa Jewell|Lisa Jewell]], one of the most successful British authors I've never knowingly read. Now meet Will Brooker, one of the history thousands of less successful authors I quite confidently never have read. This book starts with the world two meeting each other, as that well, and shows how 2021 drew the two closer and closer together. The meeting was some unspecified combination, it seems, of Archduke Franz Ferdinand her anecdote about cup cakes, the words of Austria her latest book she was reciting, and his wife Sophie her being in Sarajevoa ''black lace mini-dress with gold brocade'' (certainly a get-up never commonly worn at the author events I get to attend), but pulled Brooker, the capital a professor of Bosniacultural studies who has swallowed Roland Barthes, in June 1914down the rabbit-hole that is Jewell's diverse output. It was their killing which led directly Brooker decides he'd like nothing more than to follow her through a year in the outbreak published author's life, working to make a success of the First World Warlatest title, and struggling with the next in line. Jewell, due diligence appropriately done, just six weeks lateragrees. And this is the result.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0230759572</amazonuk>1529136024

 {{newreviewFrontpage|author= Martha Leigh|title=Red LoveInvisible Ink: The Story of an East German A Family|author=Maxim LeoMemoir|rating=5|genre=Biography|summary=Chances are there have been major disagreements and splits Martha Leigh begins her book talking about a childhood spent in your a slightly eccentric, immediately recognisable upper middle class English family. One black sheep might have supported the wrong football team. Some of you will be strictly ''Strictly''Her father is a Cambridge don, the rest ''X Factor''. But probably nothing compares to what went forever clacking away on in his typewriter as he edits the Leo household over decades in Eastern Berlin. One complete correspondence of our author's grandfathersthe philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Gerhard, was too Jewish and bourgeois to survive his life in Germany, fled to France, and came back a Communist having fought against Nazism. His counterpart Werner ended the war with some semblance of PTSD, and more or less landed in Communist Berlin due to facts of administration, yet became a fully-fledged Party activist. Author's work. Her mother Anne worked as is a journalist on the Communist mouthpiece newspaper, even if she managed to doubt things she was forced to write during the Prague Spring and moreconcert pianist who practises for hours every day. Her husband Wolf – Werner's son – Neither parent is hugely interested in a similar industry was involved in sort-the practicalities of Photoshopping for propaganda, and often sabotaged his own outputlife. He was violent, awkward, There is love in the house but very anti-establishment. And if you can't see how having also darker undercurrents that a non-Communist in such a family in the heightened times of Cold War Berlin would be, you certainly will after reading this gripping collective biographychild does not fully understand but knows is there.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1908968516</amazonuk>1800460384

 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Barbara A PerryPolly Barton|title=Rose Kennedy: The Life and Times of a Political MatriarchFifty Sounds

|genre=BiographyPolitics and Society|summary=ItWhere do I start? I could start with where Barton herself starts, with the question 's about fifty years since the assassination of President John F Kennedy 'Why Japan?'' Japan has been on my radar for a while and it was he (and particularly his death) who brought if the Kennedy family to the attention of a new generationworld hadn't gone into melt-down I would have visited by now. An earlier generation had been split about the virtues (or otherwise) of his fatherI may get there later this year, Joe Kennedybut I am not hopeful. And like Barton, multi millionaire and United States Ambassador I don't know the answer to Great Britain. But behind both the question ''why Japan?'' She explains her feelings in respect of these men was mother and wifethe question in the first essay, Rose Kennedy and Barbara A Perry has produced a superb biography using letterswhich is on the sound ''giro' '' – which she describes as being, diaries and among other archived material recently made availablethings, the sound of ''every party where you have to introduce yourself''.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0393068951</amazonuk>1913097501

 {{newreviewFrontpage|titleauthor=Eminent ElizabethansFrederic Gros|authortitle=Piers BrendonA Philosophy of Walking|rating=45|genre=BiographyPolitics and Society|summary=''Eminent Elizabethans'' is I confess I picked this one up from the library in effect a descendant 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 author’s ''Eminent Edwardians''pages I have marked and return to its varying wisdom when I need to. Some books draw you in slowly. The latter, a volume of short biographies of four British iconic figures of This one had me in the early twentieth centuryfirst two pages, was in turn inspired by Lytton Strachey’s barbed wherein Gros explains why 'Eminent Victorians', published in 1918, walking is not a debunking of four Victorian heroes whom the iconoclast Strachey wished to demonstrate had feet of claysport''.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099532638</amazonuk>1781688370

 {{newreviewFrontpage|titleauthor=Sisters of the East EndSharon Blackie|authortitle=Helen BattenIf Women Rose Rooted|rating=3.5|genre=Historical FictionBiography|summary=Katie Crisp had never intended I normally say that you can tell how much a book means to become a nun. Raised me by non-religious parents, her family frowned upon organised religion and when Katie started secretly going to church, they strongly disapprovedhow many pages have corners turned down. When Katie ran Perhaps an even greater measure of impact is setting out to buy my own copy before I've finished reading the aid of a stroke victim, she had a vision that changed her lifeone I've borrowed. She saw herself dressed as a nun with a large silver cross hanging from her neck. She decided I want to follow her calling avoid clichés like 'powerful' 'inspiring' 'life-changing' – although it is definitely the first two and join the community of St John only time will tell about the Divine, third – but clichés exist for a group of Anglican nuns dedicated to nursing and midwifery. She thus shed her old identity reason and became known as Sister Catherine MaryI'm not sure I can succinctly put it any better.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0091951771</amazonuk>1912836017

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Jerry Oppenheimer0241446732|title=Crazy RichOur House is on Fire: PowerScenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis|author=Malena Ernman, Scandal Greta Thunberg, Beata Thunberg and Tragedy Inside the Johnson & Johnson DynastySvante Thunberg|rating=35|genre=BiographyPolitics and Society|summary=Back in 1885 three brothers were inspired by a speech by Joseph Lister, The Ernman / Thunberg family seemed perfectly normal. Malena Ernman was an opera singer and Svante Thunberg took on most of the pioneer parenting of antiseptic surgery, to create a range of surgical dressings their two daughters. Then eleven- such things were previously unheard of year- old Greta stopped eating and this was the beginning of Johnson & Johnsontalking and her sister, Beata, providers of Band-Aids and baby powder. It also brought phenomenal wealth to the founders and a variety of trusts continued this down the then nine years. The first president of the company old, struggled with what was Robert Wood Johnsonhappening. NFL fans will be aware of his great grandsonIn such circumstances, Robert Wood Johnson IV (known as it'Woody')s natural to seek a solution close to home, but eventually, owner of it became clear to the New York Jets. In between the two family that they were ''burned- and afterwards out people on a burned- there are a string of tragedies and scandals which put you in mind of the Kennedy dynasty.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0312662114</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|title=Americaout planet''s Mistress: The Life and Times of Eartha Kitt|author=John L Williams|rating=4|genre=Entertainment|summary=Two quotes on the back of the dust jacket testify to the power and public perception of Eartha Kitt during her lifetime. Orson Welles once called her ‘the most exciting woman in the world’, while If they were to find a way to live happily again their solution would need to the CIA she was ‘a sadistic nymphomaniac’be radical.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857385755</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|isbn=0648684806|title=Inferno DecodedClara Colby: The essential companion to the myths, mysteries and locations of Dan Brown's InfernoInternational Suffragist|author=Michael HaagJohn Holliday

|summary=Biographies The path of Clara Dorothy Bewick's life was probably determined when her family emigrated to the USA. At the time she was just three-years-old and new but because of Queen Victoriasome childhood ailment, she wasn't allowed to sail with her husband parents and her children are plentiful enoughthree brothers. The vast majority of them are based to some extent Instead, she remained with her grandparents, who doted on the diariesher and saw that she received a good education, memoirs both in and biographies of some out of school. She was the only child in the most important figures who served household and herchildhood was glorious. By contrast, her family had become pioneer farmers in the mid-west of the United States and Kate Hubbard has put these life was hard, as well as supplementary archive papers Clara was to find out when she and her grandparents eventually went to good use in presenting a thoroughly engrossing account of join the royal household throughout the Queen’s lengthy reignfamily. I might almost say ‘lively’Clara would only know her mother for a few months: she was married for fifteen years, had ten pregnancies, though that could be an exaggerationseven surviving children and died in childbirth not long after Clara arrived. The court of Victoria may have been homely after As the eldest girl, a fashion, but for the most part it heavy burden would fall on Clara and Wisconsin was hardly livelya rude awakening.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099532239</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Robert Sellers1789017977|title=What Fresh Lunacy is This?Ronnie and Hilda's Romance: The Authorised Biography of Oliver Reed|rating=5|genre=Biography|summary=For rather more of his career than he, his family and closest friends might have liked, the name Oliver Reed was Towards a byword for booze, brawls and all types of laddish behaviour. As Sellers’ very full and remarkably objective biography reveals, it was a funny yet sad life all at once. For although he repeatedly played up to the image of the lovable rogue which he had created, underneath the bad boy of popular legend he was at heart a professional actor who could always deliver a first-rate performance on the film set when required.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>147210112X</amazonuk>}} {{newreviewNew Life after World War II|author=Neal Thompson|title=A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert 'Believe It or Not' Ripley Wendy Williams

|genre=BiographyHistory|summary=Robert LeRoy Ripley Ronnie Williams was indeed a curious manthe son of Thomas Henry Williams (known as Harry) and Ethel Wall. He throve on curiosity There's some doubt as to whether or not they were ever married or even Harry's birthdate: he claimed to have been born in 1863, but he was already many years older than Ethel and he might well have shaved a few years off his own and that of everyone elseage. By exploiting and never underestimating For a while, the public demand for trivia, and by being family was quite well-to-do but disaster struck in the right place at the right time just as the news 1929 Depression and broadcasting media were beginning five-year-old Ronnie had to adjust to develop in America into the unassailable forces they were by the end of the century, a very different lifestyle. One thing he became one of did inherit from his father was his need to be well-turned-out and this would stay with him throughout his life. He joined the most successful men of the agearmy at eighteen in 1942.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847947204</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Hermione LeePatti Smith|title=Edith WhartonYear of the Monkey

|summary=A prolific authorOn the coast of Santa Cruz, Patti Smith enters the lunar year of the monkey - one packed with mischief, sorrow, Edith Whartonand unexpected moments. In a stranger's published output included over twenty novelswords, one a Pulitzer Prize winner''Anything is possible: after all, and 85 short stories, as well as poetry and books on interior design and travelit's the year of the monkey''. Born in As Smith wanders the United States coast of Santa Cruz in 1862solitude, she travelled extensively throughout Europereflects on a year that brings huge shifts in her life - loss and ageing are faced head-on, and settled permanently in France where she died as it the shifting political waters in 1937America.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1845952014</amazonuk>1526614758

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Sylvie Simmons1912242052|title=I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard CohenO Joy for me!|author=Keir Davidson|rating=4.53|genre=BiographyArt|summary=If you or I wanted ''Oh Joy for me!'' gives Coleridge credit for being ''the first person to walk the mountains alone, not because he had to write a story about an imaginary figure who began as a novelist and poetfor work, then became acclaimed as a singer-songwriter in the swinging sixtiesminer, made and lost a fortunequarryman, became a monkshepherd or pack-horse driver, and returned but because he wanted to a musical career at an age when most mortals are well into retirement, for pleasure and found himself not only more popular than ever but also playing to the largest audiences in his entire life, it would be dismissed as total fantasyadventure. Nobody could make it up – His rapturous encounters with their natural beauty, and nobody needs toits literary consequences, because in a nutshell that is the life (so far) changed our view of Leonard Cohen, the subject of this biography and surely one of the music business’s most unique figuresworld''.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099549328</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=J C KannemeyerGraff_Find|title=J.M. Coetzee: A life in writingFind Another Place|author=Ben Graff|rating=43.5|genre=BiographyAutobiography|summary=J.M. (John Maxwell) Coetzee is described as probably the most celebrated and decorated writer throughout the English-speaking world. The author When Ben Graff's grandfather Martin handed him a plastic folder of sixteen published novelshandwritten notes from his journal, he has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Booker Prize twicedidn't take much notice of it. At the same time he has guarded his privacy jealously, tending to decline interviews and requests to discuss his workage of 24, and refusing to collect prestigious awards in person. On one occasion he explained his absence by saying that he could not imagine Graff didn'anything better calculated to reduce me to misery'. One acquaintance claims to have attended several dinner parties at which t realise the gravity of the author pages he was a fellow guest and did not utter a single wordholding.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1922070084</amazonuk>

{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Vladimir Alexandrov1789016304|title=The Black RussianWar and Love: A family's testament of anguish, endurance and devotion in occupied Amsterdam|author=Melanie Martin

|summary=Until I Melanie Martin read about what happened to Dutch Jews in occupied Amsterdam during World War II and was entranced by what she discovered, particularly in ''The Diary of Ann Frank'' but then realised that her own family's stories were equally fascinating. A hundred and seven thousand Jews were deported from the city during the war years, but only five thousand survived and Martin could not understand how this book I had could be allowed to happen in a country with liberal values who were resistant to German occupation. Most people believed that the occupation could never come across happen: even those who thought that the story of Frederick Bruce ThomasGermans might reach the city were convinced that they would soon be pushed back, 'that the Amsterdammers would never allow what happened to escalate in the Black Russian'way that it did, beforebut initial protests melted away as the organisers became more circumspect. It is 's an atrocity on a remarkable tale vast scale but made up of rags to riches, tragedy, success against the odds and subsequent failuretens of thousands of individual tragedies.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1781855196</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Lucy Moore1786893452|title=NijinskyThe Ungrateful Refugee|author=Dina Nayeri

|summary=The name Nijinsky is synonymous with dance from Here in the last days West, we see news reports about immigrants on a regular basis – some media welcoming them, some scaremongering about them. But all of imperial Russiathose stories are written by journalists – almost always western, and almost always, no matter how deep the investigative journalism they carry out, outsiders to the world and the situations that refugees find themselves in. I must confess It's rare that we find out the journeys from the refugees themselves – and this is a rare opportunity to knowing little about him until I read do that, in thisintelligent, powerful and moving work by Dina Nayeri -someone who was born in the first biography middle of him for nearly forty yearsa revolution in Iran, and for me it was fleeing to America as a surprise to learn that his career was so tragically brieften-year-old.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846686180</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Diana Souhami0857058320|title=The Trials of Radclyffe HallLord Of All the Dead|author=Javier Cercas and Anne McLean (translator)

|summary=It ''Lord Of All the Dead'' is a coincidence that journey to uncover 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 author'Lady Chatterley’s Lovers lost ancestor' s life and Radclyffe Halldeath. Cercas is searching for the meaning behind his great uncle's death in the Spanish Civil War. Manuel Mena, Cercas'The Well of Loneliness'great uncle, is the figure who looms large over the book. LawrenceHe died relatively young whilst fighting for Francisco Franco's many novels, stories and poems are widely read today, but Hall and her works are hardly remembered except by a minorityforces. Diana Souhami has done her a service in Cercas ruminates on why his uncle fought for this generous yet deeply probing life dictator. The question at the centre of this book is whether it is possible for his great uncle to be a literary trailblazerhero whilst having fought for the wrong side.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1780878788</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Diana Souhami1788037812|title=Greta and Cecil|rating=4|genre=Biography|summary=The story Fraternity 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 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 Estranged: The Fight 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 in 1951, shows her deliberately hiding her face behind what looks like a handbag.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1780878869</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|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 Brooks, two very well-off American lesbians who first met Homosexual Rights 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. HoweverEngland, despite the author’s insistence, 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' and often vowed to make 'my life itself into a poem'. Brooks, a painter whose self1891-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>}} {{newreview1908|author=Thomas Wright|title=Circulation: William Harvey's Revolutionary IdeaBrian Anderson

|summary='Circulation' by Thomas Wright is Originally passed in 1885, the law that had made homosexual relations a biography of English physician William Harvey’s lifecrime remained in place for 82 years. But during this time, restrictions on same-sex relationships did not go unchallenged. Between 1891 and 1908, three books on the story nature of homosexuality appeared. They were written by two homosexual men: Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds, as well as the 'birth of a theory'heterosexual Havelock Ellis. It takes Exploring the reader through time before, during margins of society and after studying homosexuality was common on the creation and completion of ''De Motu Cordis''European Continent, but barely talked about in which Harvey famously outlines the most comprehensive antecedent UK, so the publications of these men were hugely significant – contributing to the mechanism scientific understanding of blood circulation as we know it today. The combination of the writer's aptitude for storytelling homosexuality, and beginning the intriguing life of the individual about whom he writes makes struggle for a fascinating read, allowing one to course through chronologically arranged chapters on Harvey’s life recognition and worksequality, mixed with briefer essays on subject matters ranging from the history of vivisection leading to the philosophical underpinnings milestone legalisation of Harvey’s worksame-sex relationships in 1967.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099552698</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Simon MorrisonBuckland_Zoo|title=The Love and Wars Man Who Ate the Zoo: Frank Buckland, forgotten hero of Lina Prokofievnatural history|author=Richard Girling

|summary=This book is As a biography of and based largely on conservationist in Victorian England before the letters of Lina Prokofiev. Born Carlina Codina in Madrid in 1897term existed, she spent most Frank Buckland was very much a man ahead of her childhood in New Yorkhis time. After making her stage debut as a soprano in Verdi’s ‘Rigoletto’ under the name of Lina LluberaSurgeon, she met the Soviet composer and pianist Serge Prokofievnaturalist, best remembered for the children’s musical fable ‘Peter and the Wolf’. They married in 1924 veterinarian and for the first thirteen years of their marriage they lived in Pariseccentric sums him up perfectly, where two sons, Oleg and Svyatoslav, were born any biographer is immediately presented with a colourful tale 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 latertell.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846557313</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Yehuda Koren and Eilat NegevWilliams_Captain|title=Giants: The Dwarfs Captain Ronald Campbell of AuschwitzBombala Station, Cambalong: 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, His Military Life 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>}} {{newreviewTimes|author=Peter Ackroyd|title=Wilkie CollinsIvor George Williams

|summary=While Peter Ackroyd has published some extremely long books over In March 1829 Ann Parker married Captain J A Edwards of the 17th Regiment of Foot. He was in command of the last few yearstroops and convicts on board a ship sailing from Plymouth to Sydney, he has also been responsible for some commendably concise volumes as wellAustralia: his wife and young son accompanied him. This He was not destined to live a long life of , dying suddenly at the Victorian novelist is one age of the latter34 at Bangalore, the latest in leaving his series of 'Brief Liveswidow to raise their two young sons. Edwards'death left his widow in a difficult position: not only did she have their farm to manage, which have but she was also included Chaucer, responsible for the convicts who worked the painter Turner and [[Poe by Peter Ackroyd|Edgar Allan Poe]]land. Two years later she would marry Captain Ronald Campbell.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099287471</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Gary RaymondPeacock_mountain|title=3-Minute JRR Tolkien: Into The Mountain, A Visual Biography Life of The World's Most Revered Fantasy WriterNan Shepherd|author=Charlotte Peacock|rating=4.5

|summary=When something with such a built-in cult base as Tolkien Mostly we choose what 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, read because there is so little time and then to try and buy everything worthwhile with even a tenuous link to so many books… I can understand the object of their affectionsapproach, while avoiding the mountain of crud that could deluge the unwary. Such but I also think we sell ourselves short by it will be until the third movie part of ''The Hobbit'' is safely behind us, and we sell the sixmyriad lesser-filmknown authors short as well. So while, three-month long Blu-Ray box set is on the shelves. Tolkien enthusiasts of course like most other people I have a precarious situation – so great do they rightly hold the originalsmy favourite genres, and favoured authors, and so low can the quality of the spin-offs bewhile, there are some who will never be satisfied. But there remains like most other people I read the newcomerreviews and follow up on what appeals, freshly inspired I also have a third-string to find out more, and those at least will certainly be able to enjoy this beginner's guide to [[:Categorymy reading bow:J R R Tolkien|J R R Tolkien]]randomness.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1908005831</amazonuk>

{{newreview|author=John Fisher|title=Tommy Cooper 'Jus' Like That!': A Life in Jokes and Pictures|rating=4|genre=Biography|summary=I grew up watching Tommy Cooper, and watching my dad do impressions of Tommy Cooper. I thought he was hilarious (the real Tommy!) and loved his expressions as he repeatedly tried and failed Move on to do magic tricks! This book is rather unusual as although it is a biography of sorts, giving information about Tommy's life and his history in the world of entertainment, it isn't text heavy, and so mostly Tommy's story is told through photographs and pictures.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184809311X</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Peter Unwin (editor)|title=Newcomers' Lives: The Story of Immigrants as Told in Obituaries from The Times|rating=4.5|genre=Biography|summary=I think I was not the only person who at first glance found the title and sub-title slightly misleading. 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 – [[Newest Business and, perhaps, the lives of the more famous (assuming there were some) in obituary form.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1441159177</amazonuk>}}Finance Reviews]]