|summary=Picture the crowded atelier of the renowned sculptor, Rodin or perhaps the dimly lit corridors of Lord Grimthorpe's mansion. Perhaps you might prefer to frequent the brightly lit splendour of the balconies of the coastal villa at Cimbrone above the magnificent Gulf of Salerno. The inhabitants of such places led their tangled lives, sometimes enduring painful losses or by contrast, energetically inspired to passionate love affairs. In these stimulating environments we catch glimpses of the famous, like E.M.Forster, Virginia Woolf, sometimes accompanied by her close confidante, Vita Sackville West and then there was that tempestuous iconoclast, D.H.Lawrence. Many such lives were inspired by both landscape and lust, fashioned by each other's creative energies and endowed with artistic talents of all kinds. Here we learn of talents and beauty that inspires artistic endeavour, like the many charms of Eve Fairfax. She, who after brief affairs was gradually forced into a stoic suspension which she recorded with thoughts from her friends in the pages of annotated diaries which became ''A Book of Secrets''.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099548941</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Colin Grant
|title=I & I: The Natural Mystics
|rating=4
|genre=Biography
|summary=
Just mention the word reggae, and the name that nearly always springs to mind is that of Bob Marley and the Wailers. The music has always been very much a product of the Jamaican culture, nurtured in years of turbulent history. In this book Colin Grant, born in Britain of Jamaican parents, goes back deep into its roots, and in the process examines the childhood lives of the Wailers’ three main personalities, namely Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Neville Livingston, better known as Bunny Wailer, to provide an account of the group – but much more than that.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099526727</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Peter Ackroyd
|title=Dickens: A Memoir of Middle Age
|rating=4
|genre=Biography
|summary=
With publishers falling over each other in an effort to outdo each other in celebrating the bicentenary of Charles Dickens’ birth, it was perhaps inevitable that we should see a reappearance of what has become the modern standard life, by Peter Ackroyd. The 1200-page original was first published in 1990, while this 600-page abridged edition surfaced in 1994, and now makes another timely appearance.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099437090</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Paul Hendrickson
|title=Hemingway's Boat: Everything he loved in life, and lost, 1934-1961
|rating=4
|genre=Biography
|summary=This substantial volume is not exactly a full biography of Ernest Hemingway. In fact, it might almost have been subtitled ‘The rise and fall’. Its theme is more or less the second half of his life, from 1934, when he returned from an African safari and took delivery of his boat Pilar, to his tragic death 27 years later. Hendrickson intends it to be an account of the writer, bringing together the different elements of his life – fishing, friendship, wives and family - and above all, naturally, his writing.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847921930</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sarah Bradford
|title=Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Our Times
|rating=4
|genre=Biography
|summary=As a biographer who has previously written substantial biographies of the Queen (published in 1996), of her father George VI, and her daughter-in-law Diana, Sarah Bradford needs little introduction. At around 260 pages of text, this is barely half the length of her other titles, and probably aimed more at the general reader with an eye on the Diamond Jubilee market.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>067091911X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Mick O'Shea
|title=Amy Winehouse: A Losing Game
|rating=4
|genre=Biography
|summary=At the risk of stating the obvious, this is a sad book. Writing this review some five months after her death, now the immediate smoke has cleared, it is apparent from this book (as well as other general sources) that she was a gifted performer, with a jazz voice which could have qualified her for a lengthy career long after scores of aspiring X-Factor contestants had given up singing and opted for less glamorous, more steady careers. After all, her idols had been not only near-contemporaries like Michael Jackson and Missy Elliott, but also those of an earlier generation such as the classic 1960s girl groups, as well as Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, with whom she was thrilled to record a duet four months before she died.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0859654826</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Matthew Hollis
|title=Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas
|rating=5
|genre=Biography
|summary=Most historians tend to refer to Edwardian England as the thirteen-year interlude between the Victorian era and the shots at Sarajevo which precipitated the First World War, an era of relative stability. However, there had been ominous rumblings from the new order of things during the two years or so prior to June 1914, particularly from a new spirit among the younger literary generation. The old Victorian writers, notably the uniquely terrible Poet Laureate Alfred Austin (doubtless a very good man, but an almost comically inept writer of verse) were dismissed as irredeemably old hat by the likes of Rupert Brooke and W.H. Davies. For a short time London was the poetry capital of the world, and the book opens with the opening in January 1913 of Harold Monro’s poetry bookshop in Bloomsbury, which rapidly became a magnet for the self-proclaimed Georgian poets and readers.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0571245986</amazonuk>
}}
{{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
|title=Yossarian Slept Here
|rating=5
|genre=Autobiography
|summary='To live forever or die in the attempt' was the essential glory in life and living that is at the heart of John Yossarian in [[Catch 22 by Joseph Heller|Catch 22]]. This autobiography of the daughter of his creator, Joseph Heller, reveals how the same excitement and joie de vivre suffused throughout the Heller family. The harebrained unpredictability, the madcap exploits and relationships bowl us through this book with terrific pace and verve.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099570084</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Chambers and Joan Bakewell
|title=Chambers Biographical Dictionary
|rating=4
|genre=Biography
|summary=It's now the ninth edition of this famous volume and that came as a bit of a shock when I glanced at the bookcase and realised that my copy dated back to 1974 and was still in regular use for a quick guide as to who might have been who. It's advertised as 'the great, the good, the not-so-great and the downright wicked' and it's difficult to better that summary. It has eighteen thousand biographies and differs from ''Who's Who'' with it's thirty thousand entries in that covers the dead as well as the living and the ''interesting'' rather than those who need to be included because they have achieved a certain position.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0550106936</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Claire Tomalin
|title=Charles Dickens: A Life
|rating=5
|genre=Biography
|summary=Having already written biographies of Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen, among others, to say nothing of a study of Dickens and his mistress Nelly Ternan, Claire Tomalin is admirably qualified to produce a major life of the author to mark the bicentenary of his birth in 1812. (Sadly, she says this will be her last large-scale book).
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670917672</amazonuk>
}}
