Newest Biography Reviews
From TheBookbag
Biography
Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life by Lyndall Gordon
It is hardly surprising that the lives of the Brontës have attracted so many biographers, and the story of the siblings' short existences and premature deaths has been told many a time. Where Lyndall Gordon's account differs from these is in exploring Charlotte's life from a more feminist viewpoint than that of the apparently downtrodden novelist, who in the words of her contemporary and first biographer Mrs Gaskell was a valiant woman made perfect by sufferings. Full review...
Oscar's Books by Thomas Wright
Oscar Wilde, so the introduction tells us, devoured and luxuriated in books. He had a lifelong thirst for reading, and his house was (obviously) packed with them. It comes as no surprise to find out that he was an accomplished speed reader with a remarkable – and to some extent photographic – memory which helped him to absorb and recall instantly vast amounts of prose and verse. As a reviewer for Pall Mall Gazette, he could master a book's content, plot or argument in minutes. We think he would have been the ideal patron saint of Bookbag. Full review...
Agatha Christie: An English Mystery by Laura Thompson
Agatha Christie, the creator of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, was one of the select few ultra-successful, very prolific authors who became an institution within her lifetime. She was much read, widely adapted for television, cinema and stage, and often criticised for her sometimes formulaic plots as well as eagerly sought-after by those who had loved her earlier books and were always eager for the next 'Christie for Christmas', something her publishers did not hesitate to exploit. Full review...
Return to the Middle Kingdom by Yuan-Tsung Chen
Yuan-Tsung Chen's family have lived through momentous times in China and been as close to what was happening as any one family could be. Chen Guixin, born in 1830 in the time of the Manchu government and just before the beginning of the Opium Wars was her husband's grandfather. He was a part of the Taiping Rebellion but it was his son, Chen Youren who was hailed as a hero when he marched into two former British concessions and reclaimed the land for China. He was the first foreign minister of modern China to have taken back land from the colonial powers. The author married Chen Youren's son, the journalist and artist Jack Chen, who was arrested by the Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution and who later continued his work in the USA. Full review...
Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music by David N Meyer
Gram Parsons was in effect rock music's James Dean. He died too young to have achieved much, but in going to an early grave he seems to have achieved this iconic status of one of the 20th century's legendary might-have-been-greats if only he had lived longer. Full review...
King's Mistress, Queen's Servant: Henrietta Howard by Tracy Borman
Henrietta Howard, later Countess of Suffolk, is probably one of the least remembered of royal mistresses. Given that her royal lover was one of the least-remembered of British sovereigns, was not wicked or horrible enough to be that infamous and therefore that interesting, and was one of the much-maligned Hanoverians to boot, this is hardly surprising. Full review...
The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King by Ian Mortimer
Kings of England, at least those prior to King Henry VIII, seem on the whole a shadowy crowd. They come half-alive through our knowledge of occasional legends, battles fought (and preferably won), and characterisations in Shakespeare's plays, yet still seem oddly remote and two-dimensional. Full review...
Swimming in a Sea of Death by David Rieff
David Rieff's mother had cheated death twice. In 1974 she was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer and no one rated her chances of surviving but she felt special and underwent radical surgery and experimental treatments. She survived but the damage done to her body and, her son believes, to her sexuality was immense. The cancer resurfaced in the nineteen nineties as a uterine sarcoma but was beaten by chemotherapy and still she felt special. It was only when she was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome – for which there was no cure. His mother admitted to him that she no longer felt special. She was Susan Sontag, essayist and scientific rationalist. Three years after her death in 2004 her son was still overwhelmed by guilt about her death. Full review...
Chopin's Funeral by Benita Eisler
How is Frederic Chopin best remembered today – as one of the leading composers of his time, or as a sickly man who endured an unhappy affair with a man-eating lady novelist and was fated not to survive middle age? Full review...
The Open Road by Pico Iyer
Although subtitled The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama The Open Road is not really about the journey. It's about the road itself, what the road is and where the current Dalai Lama finds himself upon it. Full review...
For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond by Ben Macintyre
This may be one of the hardest books I've had to review so far; I don't think anyone who's been alive and conscious in Britain any time in the past fifty years, can approach anything James Bond related without bringing an extreme amount of prejudice with them. Full review...
Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies by Donald Spoto
I came to this biography knowing very little about Alfred Hitchcock, and with only a fairly skeletal knowledge of his films. In itself, that was probably an advantage, as I had no preconceptions about the man and therefore hardly knew what to expect. Full review...
Dawn French: The Unauthorized Biography by Alison Bowyer
While reading this book, it struck me that being one of the nation's funniest people often means there's a desperately unhappy or at least rather troubled soul behind the public face. George Formby, Tony Hancock, Wilfrid Brambell and John Cleese are probably the most obvious examples. While Dawn French has generally managed to present a smiling face to the world, this thoughtful biography reveals that she too has had her difficult times. Full review...
Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh by Amy Raphael (Editor)
Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh is an intimidatingly chunky book. The director himself stares out of the cover, holding a camera lens up to one eye. It's a fitting image for Mike Leigh, a simple representation of a man in love with the cinematic medium, but who has never sacrificed his emphasis on characterisation and human emotion within his films. Full review...
The Last Princess: The Devoted Life of Queen Victoria's Youngest Daughter by Matthew Dennison
Such was Queen Victoria's personality and, it must be said, iron control of her children, that all nine inevitably spent much of their adult lives in her shadow. Of none was this more true than Beatrice. Full review...
A Corkscrew is Most Useful: The Travellers of Empire by Nicholas Murray
The British Empire, lawd bless it – so large the sun never set on it. Also never resting upon its surface, if this book is anything to go by, was an increasing spread of the moneyed classes, gallivanting off to all corners, whether as imperial missionaries, explorers, or just plain travellers. Full review...
Family Romance by John Lanchester
Having published three novels, John Lanchester turns to non-fiction for his fourth book. Though subtitled A memoir, it is largely a biography of his parents. The main emphasis is on his mother Julia, born in Ireland in 1920. In her teenage years she became a nun, decided the life was not for her, and left the convent, a move which resulted in estrangement from her family. While working at a sanatorium during the Second World War she contracted TB, fell in love and became engaged to another patient who sadly died soon afterwards. Full review...
What Is She Doing Here? by Kate Clanchy
When I was first asked to review Kate Clanchy's 'moving memoir of a friendship with a Kosovan refugee' I was far from enthusiastic about it. I suspected it to be yet another woeful tale which would eventually end up rubbing spines with all the Child Called It replicas and tragic real life stories. I have no problem with people making money out of their misfortune (ahem) but these sorts of books can hardly be branded an enjoyable read can they?
However, What Is She Doing Here? turned out to be one of the most remarkable books I have ever had the fortune to read. Full review...
Dear John by Joan Le Mesurier
I really enjoy reading biographies and always find I learn a lot about the subject that I didn't know before. Recently, I read the Hattie Jacques biography by Andrew Merriman. Hattie was once married to Dad's Army star John Le Mesurier and I had a biography on him in my ever-growing 'To Be Read' pile, so I chose that to read next. I felt it would add an extra dimension to what I had learned about Hattie's life – and indeed it did. Full review...
The Bloody White Baron by James Palmer
In The Bloody White Baron we meet the memorable and terrifying character of Baron Ungern, or to give him his full birth name, Nikolai Roman Maximilian Ungern-Sternberg, born four years before Hitler in 1885 and sharing many of the same characteristics – charisma, an overwhelming sense of vision, great military bravery, contempt for the opinion of others, teetotal (though Ungern was addicted to opium), asceticism, rabid anti-Semitism and a strong sense of personal superiority. Austrian-born to German parents, Ungern's aristocratic upbringing in Estonia, his love of horsemanship and military life drew him to a troubled career in the Russian military, with a finale as leader of a cavalry army in Mongolia, funded from his own purse and rampant looting. He was proud of his warlike ancestors, who bore names like 'the Axe' and 'Brother of Satan'; his great-great-grandfather was a shipwrecker and bandit. His father was subject to violent rages, resulting in five years in a mental institution; his parents divorced when Ungern was six. Full review...
The Remarkable Lives of Bill Deedes by Stephen Robinson
Bill Deedes holds the distinction of being, so far, the only person in Britain to be at different times both a cabinet minister and editor of a national newspaper. A remarkably packed life as a journalist – it is that career, rather than his political one, for which he will be remembered most – saw him as a close observer of several world issues, from the Abyssinian war in the 1930s to the Darfur crisis of the 21st century. Full review...
A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain by Marc Morris
Marc Morris is another one of those Oxbridge-educated academic broadcasters - we like them lots, don't we? He presented the Channel 4 series Castle a couple of years back and it was a great favourite hereabouts. So he has all the right credentials for armchair historians like me. I was really looking forward to his book on Edward I, Longshanks, the long-lived medieval king who conquered Wales and Scotland, pacified a civil war, went on Crusade and, infamously, expelled the Jews. I wasn't disappointed. Full review...
Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore
If Hitler was the most evil person in history within our generation, Stalin ran him a close second. Yet as this biography of the latter's early years shows, he was a complex man of many facets. Born Josef Djugashvili in poverty in 1878 and known as Soso during his childhood, he was the only surviving child of his parents' marriage – if one chooses not to believe the rumours that he was born on the wrong side of the wedding ring to his promiscuous mother. His (presumed) father was a hard drinker who beat his wife and child. At 14 he was awarded a scholarship to the Georgian Orthodox Seminary of Tiflis, Georgia, where he wrote poetry, sang in the choir and at weddings – and became involved in the Marxist movement. Full review...
Poe by Peter Ackroyd
They say rules are made to be broken, and Ackroyd breaks one in the opening chapter of this concise biography, by starting with Poe’s last few days on earth. Normally I would find this approach irritating, though I’ve often seen it done before. Nevertheless it does lead the reader well into the story, by way of an introduction to what was an extraordinary life. Full review...
