Biography & Memoir

Gaston Bachelard is inviting us to go beyond what we think we know. That is, how to counter boring intuitions with interesting ones. But who is to say which is which? I suppose the answer depends on how...

‘He had one illusion – France; and one disillusion – mankind, including Frenchmen.’ John Maynard Keynes’s description of the political philosophy of Georges Clemenceau, who led France through...

Benjamin Franklin was a total immerser; he bathed in the cold morning breeze, just as he plunged into the freezing Thames, or wallowed in the company of London wags and wits, or, above all, absorbed himself...

Jean Epstein compared going to a movie to entering a state of hypnosis, an aesthetic experience that ‘modifies the nervous system’ much more than reading does. And it would be perverse to deny that...

John Lewis and his peers wanted ‘Freedom Now!’ – freedom from the limitations imposed on their parents and freedom to share fully in the possibilities unleashed by American prosperity. They welcomed...

Cecil Rhodes saw the ‘native question’ very differently from imperial officials and missionaries who tried to restrain the exploitation of Africans. Though he’d once broken a finger heaving pay dirt...

The characteristic flavour of Spark’s writing was that of a Catholic ironist, for whom the terrible and the laughable are all but impossible to disentangle, and all might be viewed (or might not be)...

Lorde never had to persuade her comrades about a strategy, tactic or new idea, lose an argument in order to maintain a relationship or undergo any of the tricky experiences that make politics the complicated...

Asa Briggs used sweeping educational change to increase equality in England. He helped to make history, as well as writing it. Today, as universities falter and plutocratic inequality towers over Asa’s...

In August 1937, three German journalists were expelled from Britain for suspected espionage. Retaliation was a legitimate reason to get rid of Norman Ebbutt, and he was served his expulsion order by the...

A proud sci-fi and fantasy nerd, Amanda Knox inhabits the multiverse. She ‘fantasises about moving to a remote village in Germany and becoming a seamstress’; ‘If all else fails,’ she jokes, ‘I...

For the hospital, and for the NHS, it was a closed case, another preventable death: medicine is imperfect, such things happen. I couldn’t accept that. Looking back, I was setting the immeasurable private...

Stein loved the idea that writing might have esoteric meanings but that those meanings would be only faintly perceived by the abstract reader, that a text could simultaneously be plain while explaining...

From the MAGA perspective, snitching is the pejorative liberal word for the exercise of grassroots democracy needed to keep bureaucrats honest and put phoneys from the ‘woke’ intelligentsia in their...

Richard Ellmann saw himself as emulating Joyce: the main job of the biographer was less a matter of ‘observing’ than of ‘ferreting’, which was also the word he used to describe ‘Joyce’s habit...

In the de-Sturgeonisation process that took place in the wake of her resignation, the narrative was rewritten. Her relatability, gravitas and high approval ratings were forgotten; her managerialism, insularity...

Many birders spend long days in nature looking for an example of a particular species, and then, on finding it, do nothing. They just jot something down, or maybe take a photograph. This makes their fervour,...

I’d been told in no uncertain terms at the ‘technical briefing’, even if you think you’re a good driver, even if you passed your test thirty years ago and have more than a million kilometres of...