Order your FREE Sample today! Call 0845 357 3613
Oldie Review Of Books - Miscellaneous
Sign up for our email newsletter
Only the finest Oldie missives direct to your inbox.
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.
THE DISAPPEARANCE of billions of the world’s bees is a mystery: many scientists and farmers blame a rogue virus but other evidence points to the over-use of pesticides, particularly new nicotine-based varieties, which have played havoc with the bees’ natural orientation instincts.
DESPITE a distinguished career in public life, Nigel Lawson had difficulty in finding a British publisher for his book because of his scepticism about the conventional wisdom on climate change.
RICHARD GRANT won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award for his earlier work, Ghost Riders, which examined the various nomads of modern America.
CLARISSA'S COMFORT FOOD is a new collection of recipes by Clarissa Dickson Wright, one half of Two Fat Ladies, one time cook for Graham C Greene’s family (nephew of the writer) and a fierce Countryside Alliance campaigner.
Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind was first published in 1936 and the blockbuster movie of the same name was first released in 1939, making this year its 70th anniversary.
PETER ALLISS, 77, was a leading golf professional in his day, winning three British PGA Championships, playing in eight Ryder Cup teams and ten World Cups.
Susan Hill’s Howards End is on the Landing was inspired by a search through her ramshackle shelves for something to read.
PHILIP HOARE is the biographer of Noël Coward and has a reputation as ‘a kind of literary archaeologist,’ as Peter Marren said in the Independent.
CHARLES LUTWIDGE DODGSON, like his biographer Robin Wilson, was a Fellow in Mathematics at Oxford.
In 1998, writer, broadcaster and campaigner Natasha Walter’s The New Feminism pronounced the battle won.
The clue to this book, said Michael Sims in the Washington Post, is in its ‘antique title’, which positions Sims clearly ‘in the tradition of comprehensive personal essayists, à la 17th-century scholar Robert Burton.
Quirky histories can be a tricky formula to get right,’ said the Economist.
Rick Gekoski’s Outside of a Dog was inspired by the loss of his entire collection in an acrimonious divorce.
Graham Robb is the author of the hugely successful The Discovery of France (2007).
IN PLAYING THE ENEMY, John Carlin, former Independent correspondent in South Africa, ‘tells the story of the final of the 1995 Rugby World Cup and the decisive role it played in creating a real post-apartheid South African nationalism,’ said David Goldblatt in the Observer.
There are three reasons for reading writers’ dislikes for other writers, says the editor of this literary hand grenade of denigration and personal insult.
MOST OF the reviewers quoted the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes’s apothegm: ‘Every age has the Stonehenge it deserves.
There have been hoaxes in literature since Sophocles was faked in 400 BC.
‘THE STATISTICS are horrifying,’ wrote Blake Morrison in his review in the Guardian of freelance journalist Rose George’s new book about excrement and global sanitation: ‘2.
SHORTLISTED for the Samuel Johnson Prize, The Brother Gardeners was also a Book of the Week on Radio 4 earlier this year.
in 2005 a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, published twelve cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Actually, this is about how two men fooled the art establishment, one a brilliant forger, John Myatt, who used ordinary emulsion mixed with turpentine, linseed oil and KY jelly to render 200 paintings by modern masters, and the other a fantasist named John Drewe, the conman of the title, who planted false provenance trails in the archives of leading institutions and sold the forgeries to gullible and greedy dealers.
Irving Kirsch, professor of psychology at the University of Hull, has revealed ‘the truth about antidepressants,’ said Dublin’s Sunday Business Post.
A landscape gardener who grew up in nearby Barrow-in-Furness, Ian Thompson’s history of the Lake District is accompanied by his own colour photographs, as well as by paintings by Lakeland artists.
BORKOWSK, HIMSELF a theatrical PR man, came across a scoop when the descendants of an early Hollywood publicist named Maynard Nottage handed him a batch of family papers, including Nottage’s unpublished memoir detailing his bitter decline.
‘Is this Britain’s most unlikely celebrity chef?’ asked Roland White in the Times, clearly bemused that the once notorious Tory hard-man Norman ‘polecat’ Tebbit had written a cookery book.
Tom Hodgkinson is the ukulele-playing creator of the Idler magazine and author of How to be Idle and
How to be Free.
KATHERINE Swift’s first book, which was greeted with unanimous praise by reviewers, is an account of her creation of the garden at the Dower House in Morville Hall, Shropshire, which she leased from the National Trust twenty years ago.
Nobody could be better placed to set down the history of the National Gallery than its Director, a post held by Charles Saumarez Smith for five years until 2007 (he is now chief executive of the Royal Academy).
THE CHART-TOPPING success of The Shack, a self-published novel whose hero faces his fears in a remote shack and meets three unorthodox characterisations of the Holy Trinity, delighted the Oregonian who hailed the author as one of their own.
The parallels between the Trojan War and today’s conflicts are hard to ignore: an interminable campaign in the East; leaders who claim to be sanctioned by God; an enemy that won’t accept defeat; dissension among allies and malcontent at home.
This is one of the most curious memoirs of the year.
‘I LIKE YOUR deadpan, fearless sort of way of whacking the nail on the head – when everybody else is trying to hang pictures on it.
Advertisements:
© 2010 Oldie Publications Ltd. (Company No. 02649845). Kenrick House 65 Newman Street W1T 3EG. Contact us