==Biography==
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{{newreview
|author=Molly Carr
|title=In Search of Dr Watson - A Sherlockian Investigation
|rating=3.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=The old saying that behind every great man there is a great woman has one major exception - Sherlock Holmes. Behind him is the figure of Dr John Watson, his biographer, the man who shares his Baker St lodgings, and the man eternally flummoxed by his deductions. This biography successfully shows how the superior Holmes walked over Watson in investigative skills, and also how Conan Doyle needed Watson, if only to help us admire Holmes more by making him less insufferably smug.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1907685766</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Lindsay Reade
|summary=At school I remember spending a lot of time on the Tudors and the early Stuarts – obviously great favourites of the history teacher and then galloping unceremoniously through the intervening years until we reached another ''meaningful'' period – the Victorian era. The importance of William and Mary was completely overlooked in favour of a quick mention of the fact that William wasn't in direct line of succession to the throne and Mary had never wanted to marry him in the first place. Their successor, Queen Anne I remember simply as 'tables'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>075094577X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sarah Bakewell
|title=How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
|rating=5
|genre=Biography
|summary='Chance … really the way things happen,' wrote Howard Beck, the Chicago School sociologist. I visit Bookbag Towers with few preconceived ideas about the next book for review. I'll allow myself to fall for a quirky title or appealing cover, despite only a smattering of interest in the subject matter. Just occasionally this way, I stumble on a golden nugget so fascinating and well-written that I realise how lucky I am to be a reviewer. I'm so pleased to have chanced upon this inviting biography of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell!
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701178922</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Baldwin
|title=The Kingmaker's Sisters: Six Powerful Women in the Wars of the Roses
|rating=4
|genre=Biography
|summary=Due to the small amount of surviving personal sources, any book which purports to be a biography of a 15-century subject is almost inevitably going to be more a 'life and times' than a life. In the case of women who were sisters but not sovereigns or consorts themselves, the lack of data will be even more acute.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0750950765</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sue Roe
|title=The Private Lives of the Impressionists
|rating=4.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=In the early 1860s a group of young Parisian artists were keen to exhibit their work, despite opposition from the official art world. Their protests at being spurned by the Salon, the French equivalent of the Royal Academy, resulted in their paintings being shown at the rather disparagingly-named Salon des Refusés, where crowds and critics came to view - and jeer. When they held the first of their own exhibitions a few years later, one reviewer said that they 'seem to have declared war on beauty', while another assured his readers that every canvas must have been the work of some practical joker who had dipped his brushes in paint, smeared it onto yards of canvas, and signed the result with several different names.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099458349</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Will Birch
|title=Ian Dury: The Definitive Biography
|rating=4.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=Ian Dury was always one of the most individual, even contrary characters in the musical world. In a branch of showbiz where people often relied on good looks as a short cut to stardom, he was no oil painting. During the pub rock era, he and his group, the Blockheads, ploughed a lonely furrow which owed more to jazz-funk than rock'n'roll, and his songs extolled the virtues of characters from Billericay or Plaistow rather than those from Memphis or California. Alongside the young punk rock upstarts with whom he competed for inches in the rock press, he was comparatively middle-aged. As if that was not enough, in his own words childhood illness had left him a permanent 'raspberry ripple'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0283071036</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Mark Simpson
|title=Alastair Sim: The Star of Scrooge and the Belles of St Trinian's
|rating=4
|genre=Biography
|summary=The mere mention of Alastair Sim conjures up visions of pictures made during the 1950s when a more gentle humour was the order of the day. Yet the man hated and did his best to avoid publicity, claiming that the person the public saw on screen revealed all that anybody needed to know about him. How he would have fared twenty years later in the age of a more intrusive press, one cannot but wonder.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0752453726</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Robert Crawford
|title=The Bard: Robert Burns - a biography
|rating=4.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=If Shakespeare is England's own Bard, the comparatively shortlived Robert Burns – who lived and worked nearly two centuries later – fulfils the equivalent role in Scottish iconography more than adequately. Yet as this very thorough biography demonstrates, there is much more to the man than the wordsmith of 'Auld Lang Syne' and 'Wee, sleekit, cowrin', tim'rous beastie'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1844139301</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Linda Porter
|title=Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr
|rating=4.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=Katherine Parr was the last and arguably the most fortunate of King Henry VIII's six wives. Apart from Anne of Cleves, the speedily divorced 'Flanders mare', she was the only one to survive him. And while all six of the queens consort remain rather shadowy figures, this biography gives the impression that she was probably the most intelligent and well-rounded personality of them all.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0230710395</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Clayton
|title=The Richard Beckinsale Story
|rating=4
|genre=Biography
|summary=A generation probably knows Richard Beckinsale only from repeats on the UK Gold TV channels, and from occasional mentions in the context of 'how great he would have been if only…' In 1978 The Sunday Times Magazine tipped the 30-year-old sitcom favourite as a rising major star of the 80s who would blossom into one of the great all-round stage actors. One year later, he was dead.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0752454404</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=John Van der Kiste
|title=Sons, Servants and Statesmen: The Men in Queen Victoria's Life
|rating=4.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=Like the first Elizabeth more books than are strictly necessary have been written about Queen Victoria, but John Van der Kiste has taken the unusual step of using the men in her life to illuminate some dark corners which might other wise have remained unexplored. Of course the most famous man in her life, husband and Prince Consort Albert isn't 'son, servant or statesman' as promised by the title of the book, but he established a trend. Victoria, often regarded as a difficult woman to please, would always have a man in her life who would, to a greater or lesser extent, dominate her.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0750937882</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Maureen Emerson
|title=Escape to Provence
|rating=4.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=In the 1920s two women, one American, one British, settled in the south of France, both for different reasons. Elisabeth Starr had left her home in Philadelphia after an unhappy childhood and the death, possibly suicide, of her fiancé, a nephew of the American President. Drawn to Paris, 'the chosen European city for the sophisticated and well-heeled of the New World', she worked as a nurse during the Great War, then moved to Provence where she made her home in an ancient stone house, the Castello, and took French citizenship. Winifred (Peggy) Fortescue was the wife of the Royal Librarian at Windsor, who retired in 1926 with a knighthood and became a renowned (though hardly successful in financial terms) military historian. After the fall of the pound, it was hard for them to make ends meet in England, and they were drawn to find a property in Provence partly by the lifestyle, partly by a favourable exchange rate.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0955832101</amazonuk>
}}
