Biography & Memoir

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...

The narrator of Hillbilly Elegy doesn’t sound like someone who’s intending to run for office – otherwise, presumably, J.D. Vance would have cut all those sentences about the laziness of poor white...

It becomes apparent from Owen’s graphic and appalled letters home that it was the urge to make his mother, in the first instance, see and feel what the Western Front was really like that drove him to...

Fanon’s world has a logic. His pages are full of identities, contradictions, Aufhebungen – master and slave, being and nothingness. Any biography, however, has to decide in the end which of the various...

It has been said, with justification, that Kubrick’s films show a preoccupation with violence. Yet his interest is of a peculiarly unexcitable kind, whether the action is grinding, as in trench warfare,...

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon insisted that women should have the right to a career, for the sake of their souls, their families and society. Was she free to pursue the career she wished for? It would be...

Fools – men and women from incongruous, humble backgrounds – were dropped into the grand settings of Whitehall or Hampton Court to see what would happen. Their ‘naturalness’, or ignorance of convention...

The French Revolution soon turned into a rout of women’s rights. In 1804, the Napoleonic Code reaffirmed a husband’s authority over his wife and the Bourbon Restoration rescinded the right to divorce...

There has been an element of ‘infatuation-driven hyperbole’ in almost everything that has been said and written about Pauline Boty. In her lifetime her physical presence was always part of her reputation....

Her childhood in rural Warwickshire gave Comyns the material for her first book, Sisters by a River. It was essential to much of what followed in both life and work, though she was lucky to get out of...

As Seamus Heaney’s fame grew, and ‘the N-word’ (Nobel) added lustre, he attracted intrusive commentary. There were ‘feminist uppercuts’ and ‘Marxist flesh wounds’ from the academics. The...

Like the inhabitants of other small and remote countries, the Icelander has the choice to go or stay. Halldór Laxness did both. He was a cosmopolitan and a homebody. He yo-yoed. He stayed in Iceland and...

Each war speaks to every war, providing fresh testimony of nerves strained, hopes raised and dashed. And yet there is something tragically unusual – nearly unique – about these particular letters:...

Jo Ann Beard is a cunning craftswoman who draws circles and parallels across time, embedding patterns that unite seemingly disparate tales.

Buchi Emecheta said that all her books were about survival, but survival doesn’t always mean gritting your teeth. Sometimes it means acting the tourist for a day, skipping the royal press conference...

The torture that comes with Ronnie O’Sullivan’s freakish gift is partly down to the fact that he is playing a game where the stakes have become, for most people, so low. But for the fans, the magic...

There’s a voyeuristic quality to so many of the discussions of Anne’s rise and fall, since it was allegedly her sexual allure that made her queen and her sexual licence that led to her death. The compulsion...