|summary=For rather more of his career than he, his family and closest friends might have liked, the name Oliver Reed was 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>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Neal Thompson
|title=A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert 'Believe It or Not' Ripley
|rating=4
|genre=Biography
|summary=Robert LeRoy Ripley was indeed a curious man. He throve on curiosity, his own and that of everyone else. By exploiting and never underestimating the public demand for trivia, and by being in the right place at the right time just as the news and broadcasting media were beginning to develop in America into the unassailable forces they were by the end of the century, he became one of the most successful men of the age.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847947204</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Hermione Lee
|title=Edith Wharton
|rating=4
|genre=Biography
|summary=A prolific author, Edith Wharton's published output included over twenty novels, one a Pulitzer Prize winner, and 85 short stories, as well as poetry and books on interior design and travel. Born in the United States in 1862, she travelled extensively throughout Europe, and settled permanently in France where she died in 1937.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1845952014</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sylvie Simmons
|title=I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen
|rating=4.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=If you or I wanted to write a story about an imaginary figure who began as a novelist and poet, then became acclaimed as a singer-songwriter in the swinging sixties, made and lost a fortune, became a monk, and returned to a musical career at an age when most mortals are well into retirement, 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 fantasy. Nobody could make it up – and nobody needs to, because in a nutshell that is the life (so far) of Leonard Cohen, the subject of this biography and surely one of the music business’s most unique figures.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099549328</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=J C Kannemeyer
|title=J.M. Coetzee: A life in writing
|rating=4.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=J.M. (John Maxwell) Coetzee is described as probably the most celebrated and decorated writer throughout the English-speaking world. The author of sixteen published novels, he has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Booker Prize twice. At the same time he has guarded his privacy jealously, tending to decline interviews and requests to discuss his work, and refusing to collect prestigious awards in person. On one occasion he explained his absence by saying that he could not imagine 'anything better calculated to reduce me to misery'. One acquaintance claims to have attended several dinner parties at which the author was a fellow guest and did not utter a single word.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1922070084</amazonuk>
}}
