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...
Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure by Artemis Cooper
The sub-title of this biography is highly appropriate, for the ninety-six years of Patrick Leigh Fermor were packed with adventure. Born in 1915, he was something of a maverick at school, intellectually gifted but perpetually naughty, and his punishments for various refractions included suspensions and even expulsions. Full review...
The Crocodile by the Door: The Story of a House, a Farm and a Family by Selina Guinness
Selina Guinness lived at Tibradden as a child and in 2002 she and her husband-to-be, Colin Graham, moved back to the house when her elderly uncle Charles became frail. The surname might lead you to suspect that there were brewery millions in the background but this wasn't the case. The couple were young academics and doing what needed to be done at Tibradden would need to be done in addition to full-time jobs. The house was on the outskirts of Dublin - 'derelict fields' if you were a property developer or the last defence against the encroaching city if you were not. Full review...
Strange Meetings: The Lives of the Poets of the Great War by Harry Ricketts
The majority of recent books on the War Poets tend to focus on their lives during and immediately after the conflict. This enterprising account, borrowing its name from the poem by Wilfred Owen, takes a different approach in spanning a full fifty years or more. It begins with the first meeting of Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke at one of Eddie Marsh’s breakfasts in July 1914. Marsh was a tireless supporter of modern painters and after that promising new writers, particularly poets. The journey, or rather account of meetings, takes us to the western front and back to England, culminating in a reunion of two of the longest-lived, Sassoon and David Jones, in 1964. Full review...
Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor by Simon Callow
Once a towering presence on stage and screen, the star of fifty films and forty plays, Charles Laughton seems largely forgotten these days. As an actor of a younger generation and keen admirer of his work, Callow is well placed to bring him back to the fore. He notes in his preface that the man has increasingly slipped out of public consciousness, and even within his own profession he is virtually unknown to anybody under the age of forty Full review...
Nelson: A Dream of Glory by John Sugden
I will admit that I didn't know what I was letting myself in for when I saw 'Nelson: A Dream of Glory' sitting on the Bookbag shelf, but I had just come back from Portsmouth and a wander around on the Victory, so it was a bit hard to resist. Full review...
Wits and Wives: Dr Johnson in the Company of Women by Kate Chisholm
What's your mental image of a Great Writer? Most people would probably say the same thing: someone sitting in splendid isolation, probably in a garret, writing Great Words and hating them. The idea of Great Writers having friends, or even a family, is a bizarre one. Partly this is because most Great Writers were incredibly weird people. But there's another issue at play. We're simply not used to imagining them in context, just one small part of a large and busy world. Our notion of biography is an incredibly fragmented one: despite the fact that one of the best indications of someone's character is how they interact with other human beings, we expect biographers to essentially confine themselves to the person and their literary output. Full review...
Anna Amalia, Grand Duchess: Patron of Goethe and Schiller by Frances A Gerard
Anna Amalia of Brunswick, a Duchess of Saxe-Weimar Eisenach in the eighteenth century, is scarcely little more than a footnote in European royal history these days. Nevertheless it was mainly through her patronage that the court of Weimar became one of the most artistically renowned of the time, a reputation it never lost throughout the increasingly militaristic times that Germany went through from the age of Bismarck and beyond. Full review...
Nancy: The Story of Lady Astor by Adrian Fort
Nancy, Lady Astor, the first woman to take her seat as an elected Member of Parliament at Westminster, is one of those characters about whom it is surely impossible for anyone to write a dull biography. A determined character who inspired admiration, respect and exasperation in equal measure from most if not all who had dealings with her, she is well served by this latest in a long line of titles devoted to her. Full review...
Fifty Years In The Fiction Factory: The Working Life Of Herbert Allingham by Julia Jones
Herbert Allingham was one of the most prolific authors of his time. Between 1886 and his death in 1936 he was a busy writer of melodramatic serial stories in the mass-market halfpenny papers which flourished at the turn of the century. Yet nothing he wrote was ever published in book form with his name to it, and the magazine proprietors made fortunes while their authors were the unsung heroes of the trade. Full review...
The Man Who Sold The World: David Bowie And The 1970s by Peter Doggett
With hindsight, it’s difficult to argue with the oft-expressed opinion that David Bowie was the single most important rock musician of the 1970s. Having been a perpetual ‘one to watch’ from around 1966 onwards but with only one hit during that decade, ‘Space Oddity’, from 1972 onwards he went through several remarkable self-reinventions in musical style, with an uncanny knack of being able to pre-empt the next big trend. In examining his whole career but focusing largely on his work throughout that particular decade, Peter Doggett looks specifically at every song he recorded, including cover versions. There are also boxed-out features on each album, and articles on related topics such as ‘The Art of Minimalism’ and ‘The Heart of Plastic Soul’. He concludes that by 1979 the man’s extraordinary creativity was more or less spent and his subsequent output, successful though it may have been, was in effect treading water up to his ‘elegant, unannounced retirement’ in 2007. Full review...
Raffles And the Golden Opportunity by Victoria Glendinning
Although Raffles has gone down in history as the founder of Singapore his roots were far from grand. He had no advantages apart from his own drive and determination and his professional life began with a lowly clerkship with the East india Company, then as large and ungainly as many a government. When he went abroad on behalf of the Company he quickly learned the merits of doing something and asking permission afterwards, not least because of the time taken to contact London and then receive a reply. Even if all went well this could take the best part of a year - by which time the original question could well be academic. Full review...
Hockney: The Biography, Volume 1, 1937-1975 by Christopher Simon Sykes
As one of the major names of British twentieth century art, David Hockney has always been a larger than life figure. Published to coincide with his 75th birthday, this is the first volume of a biography which tells his story up to 1975. Full review...
Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox by Lois Banner
With the possible exception of Princess Diana, Marilyn Monroe is probably the most written-about deceased woman in twentieth-century history. The thirty-six years of her life and the manner of her death will no doubt continue to provide an opportunity for as many writers as they have since her sudden passing. After a decade of research Lois Banner, a Professor of History and Gender Studies at university in California, has added another weighty tome to the relevant shelves. As a self-styled pioneer of second-wave feminism and the new women’s history, she has some interesting insights to offer into her subject’s life as a gender role model. Full review...