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[[Category:Biography|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Biography]]__NOTOC__<!-- Remove -->
{{newreview
|title=Blazing Star: The Life and Times of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
|author=Alexander Larman
|rating=4
|genre=Biography
|summary=John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, was the ultimate 'live fast, die young' icon of the Stuart age, the seventeenth-century embodiment of 'Hope I die before I get old'. Restoration dandy, satirist and pornographic poet, he died a lingering death at the age of 33, racked by venereal disease and alcoholism. If he is remembered at all these days, except by those familiar with the history or literature of the age, it is as the James Dean or the Keith Moon of his day, a hellraiser whose poetry was heavily suppressed for many years by the censors. In fact much of his verse was not published under his name until long after his death, and as most of it was only circulated in manuscript form during his lifetime and a good deal destroyed by his mother after his death, it is uncertain how much does still survive.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1781851093</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|title=Dirty Bertie: An English King Made in France
|summary=Possibly no assassination in history can have had such momentous consequences for the history of the world as that of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, in June 1914. It was their killing which led directly to the outbreak of the First World War, just six weeks later.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0230759572</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|title=Red Love: The Story of an East German Family
|author=Maxim Leo
|rating=5
|genre=Biography
|summary=Chances are there have been major disagreements and splits in your family. One black sheep might have supported the wrong football team. Some of you will be strictly ''Strictly'', the rest ''X Factor''. But probably nothing compares to what went on in the Leo household over decades in Eastern Berlin. One of our author's grandfathers, Gerhard, was too Jewish and bourgeois to survive life in Germany, fled to France, and came back a Communist having fought against Nazism. His counterpart Werner ended the war with some semblance of PTSD, and more or less landed in Communist Berlin due to facts of administration, yet became a fully-fledged Party activist. Author's mother Anne worked as a journalist on the Communist mouthpiece newspaper, even if she managed to doubt things she was forced to write during the Prague Spring and more. Her husband Wolf – Werner's son – in a similar industry was involved in sort-of Photoshopping for propaganda, and often sabotaged his own output. He was violent, awkward, but very anti-establishment. And if you can't see how having a non-Communist in such a family in the heightened times of Cold War Berlin would be, you certainly will after reading this gripping collective biography.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1908968516</amazonuk>
}}

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