==Biography==
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{{newreview
|author=Julia Blackburn
|title=Thin Paths: Journeys in and Around an Italian Mountain Village
|rating=4
|genre=Biography
|summary=Julia Blackburn had known Herman for many years, but they had drifted apart. She put the postcard which she received from him in an album: it mentioned a cottage he had discovered in Liguria and which he was renovating. Some time later there was another postcard and an invitation to visit. Over time the cottage would become her home and Herman her husband. 'Thin Paths' is the stories of the people who inhabit this harsh, wild landscape and of the way in which the landscape has formed the people. The thin paths join the people and the places together in a way of life which is rare.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224090682</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Erica Heller
|summary=For part of my formative years, John Lennon was one of the four most famous people in the world. All that we have learnt about him in the thirty years or so since his death has kept his name firmly in the public eye, if not always for the best of reasons. At over 800 pages, this is one of the lengthiest biographies written about the extraordinary life and times of the former Beatle. It's also surely one of the most impartial.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>000719742X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Hilary Spurling
|title=Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck in China
|rating=4.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=Peal Buck, the 5th of 7 children, was born in 1892 to American missionary parents working in China, where she was then brought up. She learned Chinese before she learned English, and only realised that she was considered a foreigner when anti foreigner riots known to as the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 forced the family out of her childhood home. Later she became famous for her novels and short stories set in China, especially The Good Earth. She won America's most famous literary prize, the Pulitzer, in 1932, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. Yet her work is mostly forgotten in the US and Europe, and in the country she loved, her books were banned by Mao's regime after they came to power in 1949.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1861978529</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jeremy Lewis
|title=Shades of Greene: One Generation of an English Family
|rating=4.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=Graham Greene's father actually had six children, and his brother six of his own. (Well, there were nine in their generation for a start...) The surprising and joyous thing about this book is that it can show that Graham Greene's remarkable life is by no means the only standout in that whole generation of family history. It can continuously throw up surprises - we know Hugh Greene was high up in the BBC, but it wasn't him who helped found Canadian public service broadcasting. We are familiar with Graham himself traipsing around the world, reporting back in fact and fiction from unusual circumstances and exotic climes with dubious systems of government, but it wasn't he who was noted for being an ardently public supporter of pro-Communist China.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099551888</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Benjamin Mandelkern
|title=Escape from the Nazis: The Incredible and Inspiring Saga of Two Young Jews on the Run in World War II Poland
|rating=3.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=Do we all have it in us? Would you as a Pole in 1940s Poland, who like as not had been 'educated' in the horrendous evil of Jews by your church - would you ignore Nazi death threats and countless opportunities for the wrong thing to be said, for the truth to be let out, for betrayal - would you help a Jewish life survive?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1550280554</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Richard Lucas
|title=Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany
|rating=4
|genre=History
|summary=Take one personable failed actress, embittered by lack of success at home in the USA, and conspire to land her living in Germany as WW2 breaks out. What chance her becoming an American, female Lord Haw-Haw, being paid by Germany to broadcast entertaining, dissuasive propaganda worldwide on shortwave radio? Anybody could guess it would take innumerable factors, circumstances and events, and they're all here in this entertaining, eye-opening and educational biography.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1935149431</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Anthony James
|title=The Happy Passion: A Personal View of Jacob Bronowski
|rating=4.5
|genre=Popular Science
|summary=Jacob Bronowski was a scientific administrator, poet, philosopher, dramatist, radio and TV personality, best remembered for the series 'The Ascent of Man'. This short book, about 90 pages long, is partly biographical sketch, partly – in fact largely – an overview of his major published works, occupying about two-thirds of the book. In the author's words, it is intended as a personal view of Bronowski as a philosopher.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1845402200</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Patrick Lienhardt, Olivier Philipponnat and Euan Cameron
|title=The Life of Irene Nemirovsky
|rating=3.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=Irene Nemirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903 to a wealthy Jewish family. Even as a child she was used to travel and regularly spent time in the South of France, but the family was forced to flee Russia when they were threatened by the revolution. They lived for a time in Finland and Stockholm, eventually settling in France. Nemirovsky's father was something of a rough diamond and her mother selfish and unfaithful, vain and difficult – her mother, particularly would form the basis for several characters in Nemirovsky's books.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099523981</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Giles Milton
|title=Wolfram: The Boy Who Went To War
|rating=4.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=Giles Milton's daughter was set the task of designing an heraldic shield which represented the most important elements of her family's history. Aware that one of her grandparents is German she included the only German symbol which she knew: a Swastika. It was this incident, which was an awkward mixture of funny and disquieting which brought about 'Wolfram: The Boy Who Went To War'. It's the story of Giles' father-in-law, Wolfram Aïchele, who was nine years old when Hitler came to power and who found himself caught up in a situation which was none of his making and didn't accord with his own beliefs. He was a man who wanted to be a sculptor or to paint, but he was forced to become a soldier.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0340837888</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Dudley Green
|title=Patrick Bronte: Father of Genius
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=There have been many biographies about Charlotte Brontë and her siblings, but very little about their father. It is tempting to speculate whether he would be quite so deserving of one if he had not been the father of such a famous family. Yet Dudley Green, a retired Classics teacher, has demonstrated here that he did lead an interesting life himself. Born in rural Ireland in 1777, he spent his early years there before arriving in England in 1802 and settled in Yorkshire seven years later, where he remained the rest of his days.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0752454455</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Donald Spoto
|title=Possessed: The Life of Joan Crawford
|rating=3.5
|genre=Entertainment
|summary=Thanks to the memoir 'Mommie Dearest' by her adopted daughter Christina, the enduring image of movie star Joan Crawford is one of an alcoholic, sadistic monster. Spoto clearly believes that this portrait is a gross exaggeration, and is at pains to rectify the balance. Having previously written biographies of Alfred Hitchcock and Marilyn Monroe among others, he clearly knows the subject of cinema inside out, and has written a very thorough chronicle of Crawford's career. The impression the reader is left with, however, is that in looking at her family life and art he has perhaps striven too far to present her as a person more sinned against than sinning, a legendary talent, beauty and above all a grossly maligned adoptive mother.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0091931274</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Stephen Anderton
|title=Christopher Lloyd: His Life at Great Dixter
|rating=4
|genre=Biography
|summary=When I first had a garden I did what I always do with a new project: I turned to books to see what help I could find. There were any number which told me how to do the basics and what I needed to know to make the right decisions. It was rather like cooking only with a few more uncertainties thrown in. Then there were the books which didn't really bother about the basics but provided limitless inspiration. At the head of these writers, if not way out in front, was Christopher Lloyd who gardened throughout his life at Great Dixter, producing colour combinations which stunned and probably one of the greatest gardens of the twentieth century.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1845950968</amazonuk>
}}
