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Oldie Review Of Books - Biography and Memoir
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What has happened to biographies?
BIOGRAPHIES have boomed in recent years, bestowing wealth and acclaim on practitioners like Michael Holroyd and Richard Holmes, but according to Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian the business is in a critical state, and she knows whom to blame. Ten years ago Amanda Foreman published her biography of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Foreman was bright, ambitious and good-looking, and happy to pose naked behind a stack of her books, and nothing has been the same ever since.
According to Hughes (the biographer of Mrs Beeton) royal mistresses have proliferated at the expense of more worthwhile subjects: “Georgiana was the precursor of modern-day celebrity culture, in which Being Jordan which is surely a ghosted autobiography, rather than a biography sells 335,649 in hardback, while Hilary Spurling's life of Matisse splutters along on 12,451.
It seems a bit hard to blame it on the hapless Foreman: royal mistresses have always sold best in the biography stakes, and Nancy Mitford wasn¹t rapped across the knuckles half a century ago when she produced her biography of Madame de Pompadour. But Amanda F. is not the only villain of the piece: equally culpable, it seems, are publishers, who far prefer to commission a well-known name to write another unnecessary biography of Hitler or Napoleon rather than risk an untried author and an unfamiliar subject. There's some truth in the accusation, but again it¹s nothing new.
In the 1930s Jonathan Cape, the most distinguished literary publisher of the day, urged authors stuck for a subject to have another crack at Nelson; O G S Crawford is hardly a household name, yet Kitty Hauser found herself a publisher and was widely reviewed. Kathryn Hughes approves the Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate¹s suggestion of a 'paradigm shift', in that bright biographers now concentrate on an aspect of a life rather than a blow-by-blow account.
The truth is that too many biographies are boring and badly written: their authors may or may not be familiar with primary sources, but unlike Hesketh Pearson (who wasn¹t) they cannot tell a story, crack a joke, build up the subsidiary characters, or modulate between slow and fast, sad and funny. If some of them fail to find publishers, so much the better.
‘THERE ARE MANY books on the market relating to the war in Afghanistan,’ said Major Mike Peters in Soldier magazine, ‘but this one is way out in front.
Politics play only a small part in this autobiography by the former leader of the Liberal Democrats.
'Taking her title from the fact that Charles II loved to play cards for high stakes,’ wrote Kathryn Hughes in the Mail on Sunday, Uglow ‘shows how he gambled his way into the hearts and minds of the British people.
PIANO PRODIGY Alice Herz-Sommer is a survivor of Theresienstadt concentration camp, where she taught herself Chopin’s 24 Etudes.
Not a new work but a text extracted from Untold Stories of four yeas ago, this most memorable of family memoirs is republished in a pleasing small hardback form.
HENRY IRVING and Ellen Terry dominated the English stage from the 1870s to 1900 like a royal couple, transforming its status socially with lavish and spectacular productions of Shakespeare.
CAROL THATCHER'S memoir covers all of her life so far, including ‘what it was like to grow up as the milk snatcher’s daughter and to be the sister of the more (in)famous Mark,’ as the Guardian put it.
‘EDDIE Chapman’s wartime exploits couldn’t be fiction,’ wrote William Boyd in the Sunday Telegraph, ‘nobody would believe it.
Dominic Lawson led the backlash against the Tory politician and diarist in the Independent, describing him as ‘sleazy, vindictive, greedy, callous and cruel’ and reminding readers of his admiration for Adolf Hitler.
THIS IS THE FIRST and only book of Conan Doyle’s private letters, beginning in 1867 and ending in 1921.
Apprenticed at seventeen and a master cutter at the age of 34, Anderson worked for Huntsman in the 1980s and ’90s before establishing his own eponymous shop.
The novelist and dance critic of the Observer has produced a memoir about his abiding passion for fishing, which is also about growing up and finding your place in the world.
'JOSEPH NEEDHAM is one of those extraordinary characters whose life was so large and sprawling that it needs first to be condensed into a list.
THERE WAS much affection for actor Terry-Thomas, tempered by some distaste at his brazenness, in the clutch of reviews of a new biography of him.
Pearl Buck (1892–1973) was once one of the world’s most famous authors, a millionaire bestseller and winner of countless awards, including the 1938 Nobel Prize for Literature.
HUNDREDS OF YEARS after his death Casanova is remembered principally as a lover and serial seducer.
Simon Louvish’s ‘dense tome’ is not just a simple biography of actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin, ‘it’s more of a cinematic critique,’ said William Cook in the Independent.
‘There are times in Michael Slater’s indispensable new biography when one simply has to close the book from sheer exhaustion at its subject’s expenditure of energy,’ actor Simon Callow declared in the Guardian after immersing himself in Dickens’s non-stop career as novelist, magazine editor, actor and philanthropist, and for John Carey in the Sunday Times ‘reading a life of Dickens is like cheering a winning team.
‘I cannot recall an autobiography which is so endearing,’ announced Roy Hattersley in the Daily Telegraph.
Masood Farivar’s life story makes for fascinating reading, though it was strangely ignored by most mainstream books pages.
Lucie de la Tour du Pin, an aristocratic woman born in Paris in 1770, was the Pepys of her generation.
AS AN INSIDE account of the collective political nervous breakdown suffered by the Labour movement in the late ’70s, these diaries have no equal,’ declared Iain Martin in the Daily Telegraph.
THERE are, reckoned Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times, more than 200 books on Albert Einstein’s life, so why do we need another? The official answer is that Walter Isaacson’s is the first since the release of all Einstein’s personal papers.
IT IS AN ACCOUNT of desperate cruelty visited upon a blameless child, abandoned by his own family to a life of agricultural servitude,’ wrote Alan Copps in the Times.
IN AN INTERVIEW with the Independent on Sunday, Mark Bostridge said his interest in Florence Nightingale began with a Ladybird book: ‘Given to him by his mother, it sparked a fascination with the subject.
THE LAST SURVIVING member of the unconventional Bloomsbury set, Partridge died in 2004, just short of her 104th birthday.
‘The fate of Sir John Franklin’s polar expedition was one of the great mysteries of the Victorian age,’ explained John Carey in the Sunday Times.
ALTHOUGH HE was dead of syphilis by the age of forty, Augustus Welby Pugin, said Gavin Stamp, hailing a ‘magnificent’ new biography of Pugin in The Oldie, ‘transformed the built landscape of Britain’.
GRAHAM GREENE has been illserved by his biographers, and most reviewers welcomed his selected letters as an antidote to their ravings.
THIS IS THE third volume of Jeremy Lewis’s memoirs of the publishing world.
It is time for a reappraisal and Charles Williams’s biography is a fine achievement, fair in tone and spare in style,’ wrote the historian Kenneth Morgan in the Independent of this new biography of the Conservative Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963, adding: ‘This thoroughly absorbing book chronicles the tragic Odyssey of an almost great man.
HAROLD ROBBINS may actually have been the vulgarest man ever to have lived,’ said Sam Leith in the Literary Review, and the story of his life is ‘a gripping tale, and often a hilarious one’.
‘WE WANT Hattie!’ shouted the audience at the Players’ Theatre, a music-hall theatre under the arches at Charing Cross, in the years after World War Two.
Sarah Bakewell has styled her unconventional new biography of the sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne as a sort of contemporary life-guide.
Chris Welles Feder, born in 1938, is Orson Welles’ daughter by Virginia Nicholson, his first wife, from whom he was divorced in 1940.
HELEN MIRREN’S aristocratic Russian grandfather, a military man, was sent to London by the Tsar and found himself stranded and penniless as a result of the Bolshevik revolution.
Sir Isaiah Berlin was notoriously garrulous.
James Lees-Milne, snobby pioneer of country house preservation for the National Trust (which greatly underappreciated him), is rightly renowned as one of the best diarists of the 20th century.
John Piper (1903–1992) was a prolific artist who experimented all his life with different arts but is best known today for his topographical pictures of English architecture.
In Jungle Soldier, Brian Moynahan, journalist, historian and former European editor of the Sunday Times, tells the story of Freddy Spencer Chapman – who is, according to James Delingpole in the Mail on Sunday, the closest thing that World War Two had to Lawrence of Arabia.
AFTER MORE than four decades at the top of her trade,’ wrote reporter Keith Dovkants in the Evening Standard, ‘Dame Ann (as we must call her) has produced a memoir that is not only entertaining but could serve as a vade mecum to recent world history.
British author and journalist Arthur Koestler was born in Hungary in 1905.
Lesley Blanch, writer, illustrator, bohemian, is best known for her book The Wilder Shores of Love, a vivid biography of four 19th-century women travellers, one of whom, according to Anne Boston, may have existed only in the biographer’s imagination.
We have it on Evelyn Waugh’s own authority that Brideshead Revisited was not his favourite work – he came to consider its lush ornamentation distasteful.
ACADEMIC and prolific author John Sutherland’s latest work is a memoir of a childhood of reading, music and films – including musings on his experiences of first encountering The Wind in the Willows, Fanny Hill, Room at the Top, Perry Como, On the Waterfront and the work of the Irish novelist John Banville.
As if to excuse the self-evident title, the author begins by tracking down another, unauthorised ‘Byron Rogers’.
THIS SPOOF autobiography of Cheeta, the chimpanzee from the Tarzan films and the world’s oldest living non-human primate, struck a chord with reviewers tired of the usual stream of celebrity memoirs.
‘THIS IS AN angry book about a dreadful year – a true annus horribilis – in the life of one of BBC Radio’s best loved voices,’ writes Sue MacGregor in the Mail.
Readers of The Oldie will not need to be reminded what Special Operations Executive agents got up to in occupied Europe.
THIS IS A HISTORY of the cult of the Virgin Mary, from the earliest Christian times until the 17th century, covering Mary’s many and wide-ranging incarnations, such as ‘Mary the Jew-punisher’ or Mary the ‘consoler of the stateless’, as Kathryn Hughes put it in the Guardian.
Martin Stannard’s authorised biography of the novelist Muriel Spark took fifteen years to write.
Reviews were mingled with obituaries of Aeronwy Thomas, who died of leukaemia just before publication of this Laurie Lee-like evocation of her childhood at the celebrated Boat House, Laugharne, with her father Dylan, who died of drink when she was ten.
‘Evans was the newspaperman’s newspaperman and working with him was never dull,’ recalled former colleague Brian MacArthur of the man who edited the Sunday Times for fourteen of its most glorious years (1967–81).
At the age of 77 the actress Phyllida Law – who had leading roles in films including Peter’s Friends and the 1996 version of Jane Austen’s Emma, and is mother of the Oscar-winning Thompson sisters Emma and Sophie – has published her first book, a collection of hastily scribbled notes to her Scottish mother-in-law.
AMIN MAALOUF, a former journalist who moved to Paris during the Lebanese civil war in the mid-Seventies, is best known as a writer of prize-winning historical novels in French.
Peter Davison, now well into his eighties, has spent the past 17 years editing the Complete Works of George Orwell in more than 20 volumes.
THOMAS WRIGHT'S obsession with Oscar Wilde extended to trying to read all the books Wilde ever read, and even to tracing Wilde’s library, which was auctioned off after his failed libel action against the Marquess of Queensbury.
It has taken the author five years to investigate the story of what his father, Tom Burns, did in World War Two.
TO his Royalist friends, Prince Rupert of the Rhine was a kind of superman: prodigiously brave, an audacious military strategist, and an inspiring presence on the battlefield, not least because, at six foot four, he was a good nine inches taller than most Englishmen.
YOU MAY think you’ve read stories like this before, yet Agnes Humbert’s is special,’ wrote George Walden in the New York paper Newsday.
THIS NEW account of the life, genius and tragic end of Schumann was, said Robert Tear in The Oldie, ‘an important book… demolishing the romanticised notions of troubled genius prevalent in earlier biographies.
REVIEWERS OF Nureyev made valiant efforts to pin down the mystique of the great ballet dancer.
A tercentenary, so yet another Life of ‘a huge, shabby, poor, provincial outsider, regarded with such fascination and warmth for 300 years that mere celebrities cannot compete with him,’ observed Peter Lewis in the Daily Mail.
KATHARINE WHITEHORN is ‘one of journalism’s greats,’ declared Virginia Ironside in the Independent.
NORMAN LEWIS, who died in 2003 at the age of 95, was a highly regarded but often overlooked writer.
WHO WAS the real Ann Hathaway? According to Greer, she was a milkmaid, ‘stout and straight, strong enough to carry two bulky wooden pails suspended from a yoke across her shoulders.
TWO NINETEENTH-CENTURY widowed Scottish twins, Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, travelled across the Middle East to the Greek Orthodox St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula.
This ghosted autobiography has all the ingredients of a racy novel: death, love, infidelity, survival.
OLDIES WHO assume that Lord Snowdon is no longer with us are in for a rude surprise: not only is the diminutive photographer and former husband of Princess Margaret conducting a torrid love affair with Marjorie Wallace, the mental health campaigner, but he is the subject of an admiring biography which, judging by the reviews, devotes more attention to his sex life than to his work on behalf of the disabled or the victims of the Aberfan disaster.
‘I HAVE a sensation of having wasted my life, but it’s too late to worry about this,’ Penelope Fitzgerald wrote in 1974.
‘A MEMOIR from a former head of the British Army is always to be welcomed as an important historical record,’ said James Holland in the Sunday Telegraph of General Sir Mike Jackson’s account of his nearly 45-year-long career.
‘HATS OFF to Clarissa Dickson Wright,’ wrote Val Hennessy in the Daily Mail.
Stanley johnson is a writer, politician and the father of Boris.
JANE Ridley, in the Sunday Telegraph, called Jeal’s biography of the African explorer so often accused of racism and cruelty ‘a great book – shrewd, perceptive and engaging’.
THE SUNDAY TIMES film critic Landesman cringes at his parents’ lust for fame and gives a tart portrait of his marriage to the cocaine-fuelled controversialist Julie Burchill.
‘She seems to represent a very modern idea of night-club royal celebrity’
AFTER a visit to the jungle kingdom of Sarawak in 1946, noted Richard Davenport-Hines in the Sunday Telegraph, Lord Ogmore described the Ranee, Sylvia Brooke, wife of Sir Vyner Brooke, the 3rd White Rajah of Sarawak, as a ‘charming, bright and vivacious lady who brought the charm of Mayfair to the Tropics and some of the exotic perfume of the Tropics to Mayfair’.
‘After earning plaudits for a number of “daring” novels largely based on her own experiences,’ recalled Francis King in the Spectator of the novelist Jean Rhys, ‘there was a long silence of some fifteen years in obscurity and poverty before she was rediscovered and went on to produce her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea’, a prequel to Jane Eyre, in her 70s.
‘This harrowing biography details the litany of neglect, abuse and suffering at the heart of post-Soviet Russia’s childcare system,’ declared Paul Croughton in the Sunday Times.
THE CRITIC and English Literature academic John Sutherland endured the familiar privations of a wartime childhood: an absent father in the forces, and a wayward mother who consorted with the local billet of Yanks.
‘Would any adolescent instantly recognise his name today? I doubt it,’ Peter Lewis wrote in the Daily Mail apropos the bestselling author of The Devils Rides Out and other satanic mysteries.
‘The style slides self-consciously between modern schlock and sentimental drivel’
‘WITH The Diana Chronicles,’ wrote Caroline Weber in the New York Times, ‘Tina Brown breathes new life into this royal icon of ‘blondness’, she shows how marketable her story became in an age of celebrity journalism, offering ‘an insightful, absorbing account of the pas de deux into which, to her eventual peril, Diana joined with the paparazzi’.
Robert Morrison’s biography of Thomas de Quincey, the first for thirty years, was published to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the writer’s death.
One of the silent generation of soldiers who suffered at the hands of the Japanese in World War Two yet chose to suppress the experience, 90-year-old Alistair Urquhart has written a memoir that briefly topped the UK bestsellers list back in March.
Engels was not just Karl Marx’s amanuensis.
THIS MEMOIR by the novelist Emma Smith – then known as Elspeth Hallsmith – recalls family life in Newquay from 1923 to 1935.
‘NO CHILDHOOD is absolutely idyllic,’ wrote Iain Finlayson in the Times, ‘but this one, despite fault lines between the parents, comes close to the ideal.
‘WHAT a wonderful subject Ophelia Field has found,’ Blair Worden declared in the Spectator, ‘and how adroitly she has handled it.
Arthur Ransome is remembered as the author of the comfortingly hearty Swallows and Amazons stories but his early life contrasts greatly with the image of him as a bluff countrified author.
‘Any contemplation of Irène Némirovsky, author of the bestselling novel Suite Française, inevitably begins and ends with the horror of her death,’ said Anne Haverty in the Irish Times.
A US CITIZEN radicalised by the First World War, the son of Russian immigrants, Cy Oggins might have become an academic historian but instead was recruited to serve the Communist Party in Europe and later, briefly, the Far East, before falling victim to Stalin’s purges.
A 1920S PROTOTYPE of fraudster Bernard Madoff, Ivar Kreuger was a Swedish manufacturer of safety matches, who acquired match monopolies from various European governments in return for loans funded through ingenious issues of stock and derivatives on Wall Street.
AS DUNCAN FALLOWELL reminded readers of the Daily Express, ‘the Mitford sisters were the daughters of Lord Redesdale: Nancy (acidic, lonely authoress); Pamela (soft-boiled domestic lesbian); Diana (married to beer heir Bryan Guinness, then fascist Oswald Mosley); Unity (scrambled groupie of Hitler); Jessica (hardboiled communist); and Deborah (good egg Duchess)’, and their correspondence provoked suitable squeals of delight.
THE MUSIC ROOM is the second book by William Fiennes, author of the acclaimed The Snow Geese.
OLD WESTMINSTERS came tumbling out of their burrows to munch on the posthumous diaries of their renowned and publicity-hungry headmaster, John Rae, who died in 2006.
The writer Elizabeth Taylor, in contrast to her movie-star namesake, was a retiring person who considered her own life rather uneventful.
Joseph Grimaldi (1779–1837) invented the image of the classic clown we know today, both in costume and in the sadness behind the mask.
LIKE MANY reviewers Rachel Cooke in the Observer found this ‘a strange book, as peculiar, in its way, as any I have read.
In the first century BC, Rome fought three wars against Mithradates, ruler of the kingdom of Pontus near the Black Sea.
THE MOST GLAMOROUS and lively of the Mitford sisters,’ according to Duncan Fallowell in the Daily Telegraph, Diana Mosley left her first husband for Oswald Mosley, leader of the British fascists, whom she famously married in 1936 in Goebbels’ house, with Hitler as a guest.
Somerset Maugham was ‘more famous in his lifetime than any writer could hope to be today,’ declared Diana Athill in the Literary Review – attributing his riches and grand lifestyle to his consuming interest in people, ‘the detached, piercing interest of a naturalist studying a species.
Constance Spry (1886–1960) effected a small but crucial revolution in the art of flower arranging.
This is the first biography of Trotsky in English since Isaac Deutscher’s reverential three-volume study of 1954–63, to which it is a welcome antidote.
AS CAROLE CADWALLADR put it in the Observer, this is ‘a car crash of a life with details which are the stuff of soap opera.
This is the Scottish poet and novelist John Burnside’s second volume of autobiography.
‘THE more one reads about Walt, the more one suspects that anatomising such a cold fish won’t be terribly fruitful,’ declared Catherine Shoard, in the Sunday Telegraph.
‘SOPHIE was a bag lady, a drifter, a drunk.
Nick Clarke, the much-admired broadcaster and former presenter of The World at One, was never the sort of man to complain ‘Why me?’ In an audio-diary charting his cancer – a sarcoma in the buttock that led to the amputation of his left leg in 2006 – Clarke recorded: ‘If you’re slightly fatalistic about cancer, as I am, then you always think “why not me?”’ Within a year of diagnosis Clarke was dead.
William Golding’s most famous novel was dismissed by Faber’s reader as ‘rubbish and dull’ before being rescued by the publisher Charles Monteith, and according to Jonathan Bate in the Sunday Telegraph, ‘the correspondence between Golding and Monteith is the core of his biography, with the editor emerging as much the hero as the author.
WRITING ABOUT Wilberforce is ‘a daunting task,’ explained James Walvin in the Mail on Sunday, ‘not least because of his mountain of letters, speeches and essays – yet Hague has written the best modern study of this remarkable man.
‘the success of the book relies greatly on diction and tone, and Marias, whose hallmark is a quizzical precision, delivers the goods with care as well as panache.
‘SHOULD the life of a black-hearted ogre, a mass murderer who was the wickedest of the 20th-century’s monsters, be quite so entertaining?’ asked Peter Conrad, in the Observer, dubbing Montefiore’s book ‘a racy, vivid biopic’.
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