When A.E. Housman failed his final examinations at Oxford he went to London to work as a clerk in the Patent Office. After ten years of that, he was appointed, at the age of 33, to the chair of...
Alun Lewis is usually remembered as a war poet or, more precisely, as a soldier poet. ‘All Day It Has Rained’ is familiar to those who know nothing else about its author and to some...
For the past three decades, Mikhail Bakhtin has been more of an industry than an individual. Not only an industry, in fact, but a flourishing transnational corporation, complete with jet-setting...
Nearly 25 years ago, when Valentino Achak Deng was six years old, his village in Southern Sudan was razed by the murahaleen, paramilitaries working for the government in Khartoum to suppress the...
In the 1680s, Port Royal in Jamaica was a new sort of town. A deep-water port, it lay at the end of a nine-mile sand and gravel spit sheltering Kingston harbour. It was a merchant enclave and a...
In the introduction to her authoritative biography of Shostakovich, published in 2000, Laurel Fay sounds a sharp warning about the historical value of personal reminiscences: Fascinating and...
At an early point in his career, probably no later than 1930, Walt Disney lost the ability to draw what he wanted his cartoon characters to look like or his animations to do. So he began to act...
Robert Hughes begins his autobiography, as he began his recent book on Goya, by describing the road accident in Western Australia that nearly killed him in 1999, and his subsequent ordeals in...
Why do politicians write books? Sometimes money is the simple answer. Disraeli and Churchill were both scribbling before they entered Parliament, and Churchill ended with more than one small...
Lola Montez was a dancer who couldn’t dance and a Spanish temptress who came from County Sligo. She was a fake: the world knew it, and so did she. Dishonest, profligate and almost entirely...
Margaret Mead and her second husband, Reo Fortune, spent nearly two years in the interior of New Guinea between 1931 and 1933. Just 29 years old when they set out, Mead had already published two...
‘I am convinced,’ wrote Henry Church to the poet who had just dedicated to him his longest poem, ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’, ‘that Mrs Stevens has had an...
This is the third full biography of A.J.P. Taylor to appear since his death in 1990. I find this fact almost more interesting than anything in the biographies themselves. For more than two...
A decade ago, I went to lunch with Gore Vidal at his house in Ravello. That house (since abandoned) and that sort of occasion have been written about so often by Vidal’s guests and...
‘A creative artist has to be painfully honest with himself,’ R.S. Thomas declared in his autobiography, Neb: He has to look as objectively as possible at his creations. What is the...
One day in 1993, I found myself on a bus in Oxford with Michael Foot. He looked shambolic even by my standards – donkey jacket, stick, long hair all over the place. But nobody minded. You...
‘Tell me who you desire and I will tell you your history’ has become the shibboleth of post-Freudian autobiography, in which the lust for personal history has overridden the other,...
The meal is over. On the tablecloth there are corks, an orange, a few walnut shells, an empty glass and a coffee spoon. Those of us whose instinct is to see if we can somehow balance these...