Newest Biography Reviews
George Harrison: Behind the Locked Door by Graeme Thomson
George Harrison was the youngest of the four wartime-born youngsters who came together to form The Beatles. He was also the only one who came from a relatively stable family background, his early years not scarred by the loss of one parent through divorce or early bereavement. With two elder brothers and a sister, he was the baby of the Harrison clan. A poor scholar but a promising trainee electrician in his teens, a musical ear and the advent of rock'n'roll soon led him along an alternative career path. This is a finely balanced warts-and-all portrait of the man, his life, character, songwriting and other interests, an often baffling figure, a strange mix of good and bad. Thomson has dug deeply and spoken to several people who knew him well and worked with him, and as a life of the 'Dark Horse', I doubt it could be bettered. Scrupulously researched, it is easily the most comprehensive Harrison life I have come across, and the most objective. Full review...
Byron's Women by Alexander Larman
George Gordon, who became the 6th Lord Byron at the age of ten in 1798 on the death of his grandfather, is remembered not only as one of the great poets of the Romantic era, but also as somebody whose severe lack of moral compass was guaranteed to attract scandal wherever he laid his hat. This new book, as the title suggests, is not a biography of him, rather an account of his life and those of nine of the women who were unfortunate enough to become involved with him. They include his mother, his abused wife, his half-sister with whom he slept as well, plus lovers and mistresses and his two daughters. Larman admits that there could have been several more – actresses, servant women, in fact almost anyone. For Byronic, maybe we should read 'insatiable'. Full review...
Margaret Pole: The Countess in the Tower by Susan Higginbotham
The fate of Margaret Pole, who as the cover says has a good claim to the title of 'the last Plantagenet', was a sorry one. As a close relation of the Yorkists and the Tudors at a time of upheaval, her life was overshadowed by the executions of several of her family – and ultimately leading to her own, largely it seems, for the 'crime' of being who she was. Full review...
When the War is Over by Barbara Fox
Gwenda and Douglas Brady were a brother and sister from Newcastle who were evacuated to the Lake District during the Second World War. When the War is Over tells Gwenda's story of evacuee life in the idyllic village of Bampton, where they spent several years living with a kindly schoolmaster and his wife. As they settled into village life, Gwenda and Douglas found it harder and harder to come to terms with the idea that they would have to return home to their parents at some point. Full review...
James Dean: Rebel Life by John Howlett
James Dean was in a sense to the 1950s what Sid Vicious was to the 1970s – the ultimate 'live fast, die young' character, although as the star of three classic movies of the era he achieved rather more in his short life than the hapless punk icon ever did in his. Full review...
Prince Arthur: The Tudor King Who Never Was by Sean Cunningham
Prince Arthur was the eldest son of Henry VII. Had he lived longer, there might have been no Henry VIII, thus paving the way for a very large counterfactual 'what if' in British history. The name Arthur, that of the mythical King several centuries earlier, had great expectations attached, never to be fulfilled. Full review...
The Beauty of Her Age: A Tale of Sex, Scandal and Money in Victorian England by Jenifer Roberts
The name of Yolande Stephens (nee Duvernay) is not that well-known in the annals of Victorian England, but behind it lies an enthralling rags-to-riches saga. How did a young girl born into poverty in Paris become one of the most celebrated ballerinas of her time in England, and after that one of the richest women in the country, with a fortune on her death which rivalled that of Queen Victoria? Full review...
William the Conqueror: The Bastard of Normandy by Peter Rex
The basic facts of William I's life are inevitably as clouded as those surrounding the Norman conquest, the events and politics which led up to it, and the aftermath. As Peter Rex makes clear in his introduction, any surviving sources are inevitably very incomplete. Moreover, 'the writing of the history of the eleventh century requires the historian to attempt to provide motives and explanations for events that are only sketchily described at best'. Full review...
Henry V: The Life of the Warrior King & the Battle of Agincourt by Teresa Cole
Henry V is remembered as one of England's greatest warrior kings, not least as a result of his immortalisation in the play by Shakespeare (as well as by two film versions of the drama). Ironically he was one of several great-grandchildren of Edward III, and as he was considered relatively unimportant at the time of his birth, exactly when he arrived in the world was not recorded and two different dates have been given. It was the deposition of his father's childless cousin Richard II in 1399 which placed him directly in the line of succession. Full review...
Alfred Hitchcock by Peter Ackroyd
Peter Ackroyd has established a reputation for himself in recent years as the master of the pithy biography, particularly but not exclusively of those with a strong London connection. J.M.W. Turner, Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins and Charlie Chaplin are among those who have come under his scrutiny, and now he looks at the noted film director and producer, the 'Master of Suspense'. Full review...
Broken Vows: Tony Blair The Tragedy of Power by Tom Bower
In May 1997 we went to vote gleefully, sure that there was going to be a change from the tired, sleaze-ridden Conservative government we'd been suffering. The Blairs' entry into Downing Street the following day - through crowds of well-wishers - was like a breath of fresh air and (perhaps fortunately) it would be years before I discovered that the 'well wishers' had been bussed in for the event. Looking back now it seems that our hopes for what the 'New Labour' government could achieve were unreasonably high and there's a special place in hell reserved for those who disappoint us in this way. I've often wondered quite how history will see Blair: Afghanistan and Iraq as well as his failure to deal with Gordon Brown would always sour his premiership for me, but to what extent could his achievements such as the Good Friday Agreement, the minimum wage and higher welfare payments be balanced against his failures? Full review...
The Lady and the Generals: Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma's Struggle for Freedom by Peter Popham
On 13 November 2010, Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest after spending 15 of the previous 21 years as a prisoner of Burma's military junta. Political reforms soon followed, culminating with Suu (as she prefers to be known) being elected to parliament. The West rejoiced; leaders, business men, and tourists poured in; and Suu entered the pantheon of modern-day political heroes. Burma was a burgeoning democracy, and Suu was a saint. In reality, as Peter Popham argues in 'The Lady and the Generals', the situation was far more complex. Full review...
Brief Lives by John Aubrey
John Aubrey was a modest man, an antiquarian and the inventor of modern biography. His lives of the prominent figures of his generation include Shakespeare, Milton, and Sir Walter Raleigh. Funny, illuminating and full of historical details, they have been plundered by historians for centuries. Here Aubrey's biographical writings are collected, painting a series of unforgettable portraits of the characters of his day – all more alive and kicking than in a conventional history book. Full review...
John Aubrey: My Own Life by Ruth Scurr
John Aubrey, the seventeenth-century antiquary, writer and archaeologist, occupies a peculiar, even unique place in English literature. When he died, the work for which he is most famous, 'Brief Lives', was a disorganised collection of manuscripts which remained unpublished for over a century. Only in the last hundred years or so has be become more widely recognised as an interesting character and perceptive commentator on society, scholarship and on his contemporaries during the post-restoration era. Full review...
Edward IV & Elizabeth Woodville: A True Romance by Amy Licence
Given the current resurgence in popularity of biographies dealing with the Yorkists, the time is right for an account of the marriage of King Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, a union that proved so divisive in the era of York vs Lancaster. With several of the great nobility declaring allegiance to one side and then another in turn during the Wars of the Roses, it was a divisive era to start with. Full review...
The Lost Tudor Princess: A Life of Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox by Alison Weir
Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, was one of the more shadowy, lesser known personalities among the Tudor royal family. She was the daughter of King Henry VIII's sister Margaret, by her second marriage to Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus, and like so many others who were closely related to King Henry VIII and his children, she led what was at times quite a precarious life in that she was on occasion suspected of treasonable activities, and also experienced no little personal tragedy Full review...
Marooned in the Arctic by Peggy Caravantes
Misogynists are manmade. And if anyone was in a position to hate men and the lot they put on their shoulders, it was Ava Blackjack. Her surname spoke of an abusive man she had a son by, but it was her time with four other men that made for one of the last century's more remarkable stories. An Inuit native, but one brought up in a city and with English lessons, she was invited on an excursion alongside many other 'Eskimo' and four intrepid Westerners, to the uninhabited Wrangel Island, perched off the northern Siberian coast. They were there just to stick a flag in it and call it British, even if they were pretty much fully American and Canadian, and the chap whose ideas these all were bore an Icelandic name; she was along to provide native expertise, especially waterproof fur clothing. And that was it – none of her kin joined her, leaving her in one tent and four men in another, in one of the world's most remote and inhospitable places. And that was just the start of her worries… Full review...
The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
Think of iconic novels, and "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" will be near the top of your list. From the rabbit hole to the Mad Hatter's tea party and the Queen's cricket ground, Lewis Carroll's imagination has established itself firmly in Western cultural heritage: with a parade of characters ranging from the weird to the wonderful and a constant play with logic and language, Carroll's masterpiece has earned its place among classics. Full review...
Man of Good Hope by Jonny Steinberg
A Man of Good Hope is the remarkable biography of Asad Abdullahi. It tells the story of a Somalian boy abandoned at eight years of age and his journey to adulthood. It is also a testament to the human spirit and its capacity to survive. Epic in its scope it covers a journey that stretches the length of the continent of Africa. In a time when the mass migration of people has never been, more in focus it tells the story of what it really means to be a refugee by someone who has experienced it all his life. Full review...
Ray Davies: A Complicated Life by Johnny Rogan
Most of Britain's most popular and successful songwriters of the last 150 years, from Gilbert and Sullivan and Lennon and McCartney, to Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice and Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb, have been partnerships. The only solo writer in the same league is Ray Davies, front man of The Kinks from their formation in 1963 to their final performance in 1994. While this mighty tome is partly an account of the group's tortuous thirty-year history, it is also first and foremost, as the title says, a biography of Davies himself. Through interviews with the Davies brothers, Ray and his younger brother Dave, the group's guitarist and only other constant member of the line-up, other group members, managers, friends and associates, Rogan has given us as complete a book of the man as we are ever likely to get. Full review...
One Life: My Mother's Story by Kate Grenville
This memoir could so easily have become a sentimental tribute to Grenville's mother. But somehow, the author has managed to make it so much more than that. Full review...
Young Eliot: From St Louis to The Waste Land by Robert Crawford
Did T.S. Eliot like ice-cream? I should really be asking, of course, whether Tom liked ice-cream, since Robert Crawford in his marvellous biography insists on bringing us into intimate and personal contact with this so closed and impersonal of poets. For many of us, to wonder what this literary giant's favourite flavour of ice-cream was seems a somehow unsuitable curiosity – irreverent or frivolous even – as if to think about his taste for such ordinary pleasures would distract from the appreciation for his very momentous achievements in poetry. It is, however, Crawford's aim to make these kinds of commonplace aspects of T.S. Eliot's life and personality much more familiar to us, as he draws our attention to the poet's childhood years and youth. Full review...
Seeing the War: The Stories Behind the Famous Photographs from World War II by David P Colley
As anybody could tell, a still photograph is only part of the truth, if that. There is a beforehand we don't see, and an after we can only fantasise about unless we know otherwise. Take the famous image of wartime grunts pushing the flag pole upright – an icon of the War in the Pacific for the US soldiers, and the films made about Iwo Jima since. But other images of the war have been just as long-lasting, and the people in the photos don't always have movies made of their full story arc. This book is a collection of the images, and a corrective to that narrative lack, giving much more of a full biography with which to pay tribute. Full review...
Hieronymus by Marcel Ruijters and Laura Watkinson (translator)
This is a book for those who find it amusing that a biography of someone who has been dead 500 years is called 'unauthorised'. This is a book where the detail is in the devil – people pissing in the street; the locals baiting blind people armed with cudgels in a pit with a pig, often failing to whack the beast and hitting their colleagues by mistake; farting demons visiting the sleeper. This is a book for those who don't mind a spot of ribaldry, an affront to religious piety or suchlike in their graphic novels. Whether or not this is a book for those seeking a biography of Hieronymus Bosch remains to be seen. Full review...
The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science by Andrea Wulf
Alexander von Humboldt was born in Berlin in 1769, the younger brother of Wilhelm von Humboldt who would become a Prussian minister but who is perhaps better remembered as a philosopher and linguist. The family was well-to-do and both brothers benefitted from an excellent education, although they lacked affection from their emotionally-distant widowed mother, but it was a legacy from her which would fund Alexander's first explorations. His first travels would be in Europe where he met and was influenced by people such as Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, who had travelled with Thomas Cook. But it was his travels in Latin America which would lay the foundations for his life's work. Full review...
Bertolt Brecht - A Literary Life by Stephen Parker
Drawing on letters, diaries, and unpublished material, Stephen Parker offers a rich and detailed account of Brecht's life and work, and paints a new picture of one of the twentieth century's most controversial cultural icons – a man whose plays are performed more in Germany than Shakespeare's. Examining Brecht's beginnings in Bavaria, through the First World War and onto the beginnings of a career. Then, Brecht's journey through Weimar Germany where he became a political artist, struggling with the fascists who would eventually drive him to exile in Denmark, and onto life in the US – suspected of being a Soviet agent, before the eventual return to Germany, and a later life plagued with illness. This is a fascinating book about the man, his work, and the climates in which he wrote and influenced his work, as well as providing insights into the thought processes, health, and women who filled the world of Brecht. Full review...
Henrietta Maria by Dominic Pearce
The phrase 'tragic Queen' is an often overused one, but the French princess who became the second Stuart Queen Consort of Britain surely has as strong a claim as any to the title. In British history she was unique in that she not only lived to see her husband defeated in civil war, but also sentenced to death and in effect judicially murdered. Full review...
