Biography & Memoir

Since her death, much of what was said by and about Brigitte Bardot feels even less trustworthy than it was in her lifetime. In her early career she was surrounded by ‘a tremendous cloud of ballyhoo’,...

It sometimes feels as if we shall never hear the last of the Mitfords. What Jessica Mitford called ‘the Mitford Industry’ has powered on in spite of the absence of its principals (and in some cases...

For Barnett Newman, what was required was a new kind of painting produced ‘as if painting never existed before’, a painting that would convey the exaltation of its making in the moment of its viewing,...

‘When you’re 23, it seems pretty romantic to go to Paris with yr beautiful young wife to serve as an intelligence agent and write the Great American Novel into the bargain,’ Peter Matthiessen wrote...

Alexandre Kojève described his book on Hegel as ‘very bad’, and he had a point. His take on The Phenomenology of Spirit is not only misleading but slapdash, dogmatic, frivolous and flamboyant. The...

Britney’s career began with the plausible deniability of her schoolgirl sex appeal and stalled with the refusal of her right to make adult choices: no Vegas weddings, no drugged-up partying, no sex before...

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...

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...