Empress Dowager Cixi by Jung Chang
It’s easy to see why Jung Chang selected Cixi as the focal point for her study of China’s tumultuous modern history. Cixi is a truly fascinating woman, one of few human beings whose existence can be honestly said to have shaped the course of history. Cixi’s biography is not only a fascinating read due to her own political machinations, but also because of the immense transformations that occurred in China during her lifetime. Jung Chang offers a detailed exploration of the period from Cixi’s entrance to court in 1852 to her death in 1908, during which time the ancient dynastic customs of China gave way to the advent of the industrial age. Full review...
Bertie: A Life of Edward VII by Jane Ridley
Several of the main facts about King Edward VII (1841-1910) are reasonably well-known. Considered oversexed by his parents, Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort, he was blamed by the former for breaking the latter's heart and causing his early death with the news that he (Edward) had enjoyed himself with a lady of the night. He was notoriously unfaithful to his charming but prematurely deaf and lame wife Alexandra, hated reading books and learning but became a first-class unofficial ambassador to courts and countries abroad, and despite low expectations of others and poor health he made an excellent King for the last nine years of his life. Full review...
Not In Your Lifetime: The Assassination of JFK by Anthony Summers
Originally published as The Kennedy Conspiracy, Anthony Summers has massively revised the text, updated it with the latest evidence and it's been republished as Not in Your Lifetime: The Assassination of JFK which refers to the statement made by Chief Justice Earl Warren who was asked if the truth about what happened would come out. He said that it would, but added the rider that it might not be in your lifetime. Fifty years on most of the people directly involved are now dead, but the truth has not officially emerged. In fact, it's difficult to avoid the thought that the US government would prefer that it did not see the light of day. Further documents are due to be released in 2017, but, in the meantime Anthony Summer has examined what is available, investigated on his own behalf and given us this comprehensive book. Full review...
The Assassination of the Archduke: Sarajevo 1914 and the Murder That Changed the World by Greg King and Sue Woolmans
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. Full review...
Red Love: The Story of an East German Family by Maxim Leo
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. Full review...
Rose Kennedy: The Life and Times of a Political Matriarch by Barbara A Perry
It's about fifty years since the assassination of President John F Kennedy and it was he (and particularly his death) who brought the Kennedy family to the attention of a new generation. An earlier generation had been split about the virtues (or otherwise) of his father, Joe Kennedy, multi millionaire and United States Ambassador to Great Britain. But behind both of these men was mother and wife, Rose Kennedy and Barbara A Perry has produced a superb biography using letters, diaries and other archived material recently made available. Full review...
Eminent Elizabethans by Piers Brendon
Eminent Elizabethans is in effect a descendant of the author’s Eminent Edwardians. The latter, a volume of short biographies of four British iconic figures of the early twentieth century, was in turn inspired by Lytton Strachey’s barbed 'Eminent Victorians', published in 1918, a debunking of four Victorian heroes whom the iconoclast Strachey wished to demonstrate had feet of clay. Full review...
Sisters of the East End by Helen Batten
Katie Crisp had never intended to become a nun. Raised by non-religious parents, her family frowned upon organised religion and when Katie started secretly going to church, they strongly disapproved. When Katie ran to the aid of a stroke victim, she had a vision that changed her life. She saw herself dressed as a nun with a large silver cross hanging from her neck. She decided to follow her calling and join the community of St John the Divine, a group of Anglican nuns dedicated to nursing and midwifery. She thus shed her old identity and became known as Sister Catherine Mary. Full review...
Crazy Rich: Power, Scandal and Tragedy Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty by Jerry Oppenheimer
Back in 1885 three brothers were inspired by a speech by Joseph Lister, the pioneer of antiseptic surgery, to create a range of surgical dressings - such things were previously unheard of - and this was the beginning of Johnson & Johnson, providers of Band-Aids and baby powder. It also brought phenomenal wealth to the founders and a variety of trusts continued this down the years. The first president of the company was Robert Wood Johnson. NFL fans will be aware of his great grandson, Robert Wood Johnson IV (known as 'Woody'), owner of the New York Jets. In between the two - and afterwards - there are a string of tragedies and scandals which put you in mind of the Kennedy dynasty. Full review...
America's Mistress: The Life and Times of Eartha Kitt by John L Williams
Two quotes on the back of the dust jacket testify to the power and public perception of Eartha Kitt during her lifetime. Orson Welles once called her ‘the most exciting woman in the world’, while to the CIA she was ‘a sadistic nymphomaniac’. Full review...
Inferno Decoded: The essential companion to the myths, mysteries and locations of Dan Brown's Inferno by Michael Haag
Here be spoilers. Not so much in my review, but certainly in its subject, a very quickly produced companion guide to the latest Dan Brown blockbuster. It's not so much a page-by-page guide, but certainly serves as an educational and intelligent look at the background to the biggest-selling book of 2013. Full review...
Serving Victoria: Life in the Royal Household by Kate Hubbard
Biographies old and new of Queen Victoria, her husband and her children are plentiful enough. The vast majority of them are based to some extent on the diaries, memoirs and biographies of some of the most important figures who served her, and Kate Hubbard has put these as well as supplementary archive papers to good use in presenting a thoroughly engrossing account of the royal household throughout the Queen’s lengthy reign. I might almost say ‘lively’, though that could be an exaggeration. The court of Victoria may have been homely after a fashion, but for the most part it was hardly lively. Full review...
What Fresh Lunacy is This?: The Authorised Biography of Oliver Reed by Robert Sellers
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. Full review...
A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert 'Believe It or Not' Ripley by Neal Thompson
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. Full review...
Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee
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. Full review...
I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen by Sylvie Simmons
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. Full review...
J.M. Coetzee: A life in writing by J C Kannemeyer
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. Full review...
The Black Russian by Vladimir Alexandrov
Until I read this book I had never come across the story of Frederick Bruce Thomas, 'the Black Russian', before. It is a remarkable tale of rags to riches, tragedy, success against the odds and subsequent failure. Full review...
Nijinsky by Lucy Moore
The name Nijinsky is synonymous with dance from the last days of imperial Russia. I must confess to knowing little about him until I read this, the first biography of him for nearly forty years, and for me it was a surprise to learn that his career was so tragically brief. Full review...
The Trials of Radclyffe Hall by Diana Souhami
It is a coincidence that the year 1928 saw the first appearance of two English novels which were denounced and initially suppressed on the grounds of obscenity and their potential to corrupt innocent readers – D.H. Lawrence’s 'Lady Chatterley’s Lover' and Radclyffe Hall's 'The Well of Loneliness'. Lawrence's many novels, stories and poems are widely read today, but Hall and her works are hardly remembered except by a minority. Diana Souhami has done her a service in this generous yet deeply probing life of a literary trailblazer. Full review...
Greta and Cecil by Diana Souhami
The story of the notoriously reclusive film star from Sweden and the noted British photographer is a curious one. Neither ever married, both were androgynous and bisexual, plucked their eyebrows, and had numerous short-term relationships. They were like chalk and cheese; Beaton was a compulsive writer and diarist, while Garbo was reluctant to pick up a pen even to sign her own name. He adored parties, publicity, dressing up in frocks and photographing himself or posing for others behind the lens (he couldn’t look more feminine in two pictures of him in frocks by Dorothy Wilding from 1925 if he tried), while she was very much an early bed at night person, preferred to wear unfussy men’s clothes, and was reluctant to be photographed at all if she could help it. It is significant that the one picture of them together in the book, taken in London in 1951, shows her deliberately hiding her face behind what looks like a handbag. Full review...
Natalie and Romaine by Diana Souhami
The main focus of the book is the relationship between Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks, two very well-off American lesbians who first met in Paris when the former was 39 and the latter 41. It was the beginning of an often mercurial partnership which lasted for fifty years. However, despite the author’s insistence, it is less a double biography than a survey of the Sapphic society life which centred on Paris for much of this period. Barney, a poet, was a flamboyant character who used to say that 'living was the first of all the arts' and often vowed to make 'my life itself into a poem'. Brooks, a painter whose self-portrait adorns the front cover, was the product of a difficult childhood, abused by her mother who far preferred her mentally unbalanced brother, often proclaimed sadly that 'my dead mother stands between me and life'. An aloof soul, she made a brief marriage with the homosexual John Ellingham Brooks but left him within a year. Full review...
Circulation: William Harvey's Revolutionary Idea by Thomas Wright
'Circulation' by Thomas Wright is a biography of English physician William Harvey’s life, and the story of the 'birth of a theory'. It takes the reader through time before, during and after the creation and completion of De Motu Cordis, in which Harvey famously outlines the most comprehensive antecedent of the mechanism of blood circulation as we know it today. The combination of the writer's aptitude for storytelling and the intriguing life of the individual about whom he writes makes for a fascinating read, allowing one to course through chronologically arranged chapters on Harvey’s life and works, mixed with briefer essays on subject matters ranging from the history of vivisection to the philosophical underpinnings of Harvey’s work. Full review...
The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev by Simon Morrison
This book is a biography of and based largely on the letters of Lina Prokofiev. Born Carlina Codina in Madrid in 1897, she spent most of her childhood in New York. After making her stage debut as a soprano in Verdi’s ‘Rigoletto’ under the name of Lina Llubera, she met the Soviet composer and pianist Serge Prokofiev, best remembered for the children’s musical fable ‘Peter and the Wolf’. They married in 1924 and for the first thirteen years of their marriage they lived in Paris, where two sons, Oleg and Svyatoslav, were born to them. Soon after moving to Moscow in 1936 their marriage fell apart. In 1941 he left her for a writer, Mira Mendelson, 24 years his junior, whom he married six years later. Full review...
Giants: The Dwarfs of Auschwitz: The Extraordinary Story of the Lilliput Troupe by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev
The title of this book does of course carry a sense of irony, although we never quite know exactly how much. When a man of diminutive stature was born in rural Romania in the 1860s nobody was to know what would happen to his lineage – there was no clue then that he would father ten children, and seven of them would inherit his genetic dwarfism. But history has pieced together all that followed, including the careers those children had as a performance troupe, belting out showtunes to their own accompaniment, and acting in their own tragi-comic skits. And then having the limelight stolen from them by the Nazis, and a transportation to Auschwitz. And then being surprisingly saved, and given what passed as a cushty life, fed and together, but tortured at the hands of the camp doctor, avidly researching anything he thought might shed clues on what singled out his Aryan race's genetic destiny. I say the amount of irony is unknown because we are not told exactly how short these little characters are – but he, the doctor, would have known. As one of the more ominous sentences you'll read all year has it – 'Mengele had plans for them'. Full review...
Wilkie Collins by Peter Ackroyd
While Peter Ackroyd has published some extremely long books over the last few years, he has also been responsible for some commendably concise volumes as well. This life of the Victorian novelist is one of the latter, the latest in his series of 'Brief Lives', which have also included Chaucer, the painter Turner and Edgar Allan Poe. Full review...
3-Minute JRR Tolkien: A Visual Biography of The World's Most Revered Fantasy Writer by Gary Raymond
When something with such a built-in cult base as Tolkien books have gets transported into another medium, the manically interested fans have two reactions – to initially scoff at how nothing could compare with the original, and then to try and buy everything worthwhile with even a tenuous link to the object of their affections, while avoiding the mountain of crud that could deluge the unwary. Such it will be until the third movie part of The Hobbit is safely behind us, and the six-film, three-month long Blu-Ray box set is on the shelves. Tolkien enthusiasts of course have a precarious situation – so great do they rightly hold the originals, and so low can the quality of the spin-offs be, there are some who will never be satisfied. But there remains the newcomer, freshly inspired to find out more, and those at least will certainly be able to enjoy this beginner's guide to J R R Tolkien. Full review...
Tommy Cooper 'Jus' Like That!': A Life in Jokes and Pictures by John Fisher
I grew up watching Tommy Cooper, and watching my dad do impressions of Tommy Cooper. I thought he was hilarious (the real Tommy!) and loved his expressions as he repeatedly tried and failed to do magic tricks! This book is rather unusual as although it is a biography of sorts, giving information about Tommy's life and his history in the world of entertainment, it isn't text heavy, and so mostly Tommy's story is told through photographs and pictures. Full review...
Newcomers' Lives: The Story of Immigrants as Told in Obituaries from The Times by Peter Unwin (editor)
I think I was not the only person who at first glance found the title and sub-title slightly misleading. For me it conjured up visions of those who came across on the ‘Windrush’ in 1948 and the life they led on settling in Britain – and, perhaps, the lives of the more famous (assuming there were some) in obituary form. Full review...