Biography & Memoir

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...

From 1935 to 1939, Flanagan ran the most extraordinary of stage ventures. The Federal Theatre Project, set up under FDR’s New Deal to give work to unemployed theatre practitioners, produced more than...

It was our first visit to Kansas City since before the election and the rectory seemed to have grown smaller, darker, dingier. The Trump flag hanging in the alcove where we used to smoke with the seminarian;...

Stephen Hawking may have been a genius, but ‘Roger Penrose’s insights seem to stem from some superhuman life-form’; his mathematics has something ‘magical’ about it. His scientific credentials...

Christopher Hill devoted his attention almost exclusively to 17th-century England; he wrote far more about intellectual and religious history than political history; he re-created the world of those who...

Francis’s continual emphasis on mercy – ‘the first attribute of God’ – explains his papal choices more clearly than the progressive/conservative heuristic. It is the reason he wanted a church...

The diaries filled me with nostalgia for all the bollocks we had to listen to back in the day; the interminable wrangle about whether women could even do ... um ... art, which in those days was a concept...

You did not need to have met Albert Barnes for him to take against you. In late 1927 Ford Madox Ford, then in New York, telegraphed for permission to visit the foundation. Barnes cabled back: ‘Would...

The story of the Barclay brothers’ rise is ‘the story of modern Britain’, and they were certainly creatures of the 1980s, with their highly leveraged takeovers of old, lumbering companies they would...

In the new memoir as well as in L’Étoile rose Fernandez insists on the political dimension of homosexuality, the obligation it brings to question every value, and expresses disdain for those gay men...

 The only rule of a tale is that everything gets used, even apparently superfluous details – though you’re allowed entirely superfluous ogres because ogres are cool. It’s a world of wishes and wonders,...

Masayoshi Son seems compulsively driven to invest larger and larger sums so he can call himself the biggest, most significant, most visionary investor in the world. ‘Bill Gates just started Microsoft...

People​ love to talk about writers who once had radical sympathies but drifted rightwards with age. But the political evolution of the Peruvian writer and sometime politician Mario Vargas Llosa has been...

Angela Merkel’s low-key, unflappable persona makes it easy to overlook how extraordinary her story is. A life composed of such unlike elements has never been possible before and will never be so again,...

For several decades, hard-right views offered the moral urgency and dramatic clarity Reagan craved. He regularly warned that welfare statism would lead the US to fall gradually into communism, like ‘overripe...

Isherwood wasn’t quite a social novelist, except he was. He wanted opposing parts of society to work together in his books, and these novels offer places where public and private life are seen magically...

Henry VIII’s relationship with his sister was never easy, and not made easier by her ready recourse to long letters that rarely achieved the level of sycophancy Henry expected, and were often written...

To understand the scope of the tragedy of Lisa Marie Presley, and why she couldn’t find her own identity or get out from under the loss of her father, you need to have some understanding of the scope...