==Biography==
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{{newreview
|author=Frances Stonor Saunders
|title=The Woman Who Shot Mussolini
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=Most British titled families of the 19th and 20th centuries have produced their fair share of rebels. Yet few came as close to changing the course of European history as the Honourable Violet Gibson, one of eight children of Baron Ashbourne, a Protestant Anglo-Irish peer and MP in Disraeli's government during the 1870s.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0571239773</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Josephine Wilkinson
|summary=I was intrigued and touched by Jacqueline Walker's beautiful memoir of her childhood in Jamaica and London in the 1960's. This is a book inevitably compared with Andrea Levy's ''Small Island''. It follows similar ground, but the main difference and great strength, is that it's the real narrative of mother and daughter. As a girl I was familiar with areas of London where Jackie Walker lived and heard some members of my family denigrate Caribbean immigrants. From this memoir, I've garnered much about the lived experience of my less advantaged contemporaries.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0340960809</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Kate Williams
|title=Becoming Queen
|rating=4
|genre=Biography
|summary=It's a story which has been told by many authors during the last century. The Victorian age, or at any rate the woman who gave her name to the era, came about largely if not wholly because of a crisis of sorts among King George III's family. By the time his seven surviving sons reached middle age, they had managed to produce one legitimate child between them, namely Princess Charlotte. Her unexpected death, and the need for at least some if not all of the others to do their dynastic duty and produce an heir or two, resulted in an undignified mass scramble to the altar. Edward, Duke of Kent won the lottery. It was he and his wife, a widow with two small children by her first marriage, whose daughter Victoria became the saviour of the royal succession.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099451824</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Martyn Downer
|title=The Queen's Knight
|rating=4.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=The title sounds more indicative of a novel by [[:Category:Dorothy Dunnett|Dorothy Dunnett]] or Jean Plaidy than a biography. Then a brief prologue starts the story at the very end, when Queen Victoria receives the unexpected news of the death of Sir Howard Elphinstone. An equally short first chapter gives us a glimpse of the man some thirty years earlier in the thick of battle at the Crimea. Only after that do we 'reach' his birth in 1829. Sometimes rules are meant to be broken, and it's a good way of introducing this very interesting life. As the husband of his subject's great-great-granddaughter, the author is well qualified to write it.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>055215508X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=William Coxe and Peter Danckwerts (Editor)
|title=Anecdotes of George Frederick Handel and John Christopher Smith
|rating=3
|genre=Biography
|summary=Written by the stepson of John Christopher Smith (a friend of Handel and composer in his own right), ''Anecdotes'' is an overview of two men who in their own ways were remarkable. Handel, of course, was a musical genius while Smith was a man of great kindness — a good friend of Coxe's father, he married his widow to ensure she and her children would be cared for.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1904799396</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Barney Hoskyns
|title=Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits
|rating=4.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=Born and raised in Los Angeles, Tom Waits probably enjoys a status comparable to the UK's Richard Thompson. He has never sold out to a mass pop audience, preferring instead to sustain an engagingly low-key career for over 30 years, feted by critics, fellow artists and a cult following while only achieving modest record sales. While his 80s albums 'Swordfishtrombones' and 'Rain Dogs' are regarded as among the finest of the decade, most of his royalties have come through cover versions of his songs. Two, 'Downtown Train' and 'Tom Traubert's Blues', have been Top 10 hits for Rod Stewart, who once said that they paid for the swimming pool in Tom's garden, while in his early days the Eagles gave him a boost by recording 'Ol' 55' on their third album.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0571235522</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Victor Schoelcher (Author), Anton de Moresco (Editor), James Lowe (Translator)
|title=The Life of Handel
|rating=4
|genre=Biography
|summary=Although he is probably best remembered for his active role in the abolition of slavery in the French colonies, and as a campaigner for women's rights, Victor Schoelcher was also a noted musicologist. His biography of the composer Handel, first published in 1857, was one of the first scholarly works on the subject, and at the time it was generally regarded as one of the finest portraits of a musician or composer ever written.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1904799388</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Iain McCalman
|title=Darwin's Armada: Four Voyagers to the Southern Oceans and Their Battle for the Theory of Evolution
|rating=3.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=A look at Darwin's journey on The Beagle, as well as journeys by Joseph Hooker, Thomas Huxley and Alfred Wallace. Darwin's Armada provides a broad overview that strikes a different tone to other books in a crowded market. Casual readers who usually steer clear of non-fiction will enjoy it.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184737266X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Frances Osborne
|title=The Bolter
|rating=4
|genre=Biography
|summary=Life in London just after the Great War must have been jolly, even frightfully good fun, what – for the right (or the wrong?) people. The early 1920s were the years of the bright young things, the men who had been lucky enough to return from the fighting still in one piece, determined to make up for years of tedium in the trenches by whooping it up with the equally pleasure-loving gals barely out of their teens, just as willing to throw morals and discretion to the winds and party round the clock. This was the age when women thought nothing of receiving invited company while in the bath and slowly getting dressed in front of them. One hostess even greeted her guests walking down the staircase of her Belgrave Square mansion wearing a string of the family pearls – and nothing else.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1844084809</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Doris Kearns Goodwin
|title=Team of Rivals
|rating=4.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=This hefty tome, the cover tells us, is 'the book that inspired Barack Obama'. For what it's worth, Obama's name appears no less than nine times on the cover and spine, while Lincoln's appears only six, and that of the author a mere two.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141043725</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=John Gribbin and Michael White
|title=Darwin: A Life in Science
|rating=4.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=This straightforward and likeable biography of Charles Darwin charts the evolution of his theories of evolution, while providing solid insights into the man in the context of his upbringing, education and family life. Importantly, it makes you want to read ''On the Origin of the Species'', acting as a primer for the ideas introduced in that famous volume.
''Darwin: A Life in Science'' is pitched beautifully for the reader of popular science, yet gives plenty of signposts enabling future study. It also gives a very believable picture of Darwin, based on convincing evidence and without falling into florid psychological speculation.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847391494</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Michael D Lemonick
|title=The Georgian Star: How William and Caroline Herschel Revolutionized Our Understanding of the Cosmos
|rating=4
|genre=Biography
|summary=No-one can ever look at the night skies above our heads as Galileo did. The light pollution covering so much of our planet makes it impossible to see nearly as much as he might. Conversely, he would have adored living in a time such as ours – with the technology to show him so much he couldn't see, so much he daren't dream of. Sitting happily between those two extremes was William Herschel.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>039306574X</amazonuk>
}}
