Category Biography books

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London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe review – a compulsive tale of money, lies and avoidable tragedy

A New Yorker writer traces the web of deceit that led a troubled teenager to his violent death

Early one winter morning in November 2019, a surveillance camera at MI6’s headquarters on the Thames registered the silhouette of a young man on the balcony of an apartment complex on the opposite side of the river. It was dark but the fifth-floor balcony was brightly lit. The man seemed to hesitate a moment before he jumped. On the way down his hip struck the embankment wall and, possibly unconscious as he hit the water, he drowned. His body was found five hours later face down in riverbank mud, shirtless and in tracksuit bottoms. The autopsy revealed multiple injuries (including a broken jaw) that were caused either by the fall or by a prior assault; the pathologist was unable to determine which.

The Metropolitan police identified the body as that of Zac Brettler, aged 19. He had spent the night he died with a gangland debt collector and drug trafficker named Verinder Sharma. Sharma, 55, said he owned the apartment and allowed Zac to stay with him in the complex rent-free. But phone records and CCTV showed that a third man, Akbar Shamji, had been present that night. A cryptocurrency and real estate trader who lived in Mayfair, Shamji denied any wrongdoing during police interrogation, and continues to maintain his innocence. He stated that Brettler was a compulsive liar who had pretended to be the son of a dead Russian oligarch in order to befriend him and his business associate Sharma. In a further bizarre imposture, Brettler used the alter-ego “Zac Ismailov” and even affected a Russian accent. Shamji could not be arrested on suspicion of murder since he was not in the apartment at the time of the fall. As for Sharma, the M16 camera provided proof that he had not pushed Brettler over the balcony. If these men did not cause the teenager’s death, who did?

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Jan Morris by Sara Wheeler review – masterly account of a flawed figure

The journalistic adventurer and trans trailblazer is revealed as brilliant, prolific and deeply selfish

Jan Morris had two stipulations before she would agree to sit for a painting for the National Portrait Gallery in London. Ibsen, her Norwegian forest cat, should feature. And so should one of her calves. The gallery acceded, and the resulting portrait shows Morris, then just shy of 80, in a yellow jumper and dark green skirt, Ibsen glowering beside her bare legs. She was pleased with the portrait, though she thought it could, perhaps, have been a little larger.

Could any canvas contain Jan Morris? Janus-faced hardly does her justice. She was a sympathetic historian of empire who became a republican Welsh nationalist ( and who nevertheless accepted a CBE). The author of more than 50 books ranging across travel writing, biography, history, memoir and fiction, she was a workaholic who, as some of those books testify, could be shockingly lazy. A preacher of the “religion of kindness”, she was cruel to her children.

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‘Enough of this me me me’: Blake Morrison on memoir in the age of oversharing

From sad-fishing on Facebook to sensational Substack revelations – today’s readers don’t have to look far for confessional writing. Is this the end of autobiography?

Every day I meet strangers who share intimate details with me. It’s called reading. In a newspaper piece a former sex addict recalls her need for BDSM (“when a sexual partner hurt me, I felt seen”) and how she conquered her dependency. On Substack an actor describes her grief on losing a baby (“After the miscarriage, I became convinced my daughter was backstage. I would push back the costumes on the rack and almost expect to find her”). And then there are the published memoirs, first-person stories of trauma, displacement and heartbreak. It’s not just women who unburden themselves, of course. As Martin Amis says in his memoir, Experience: “We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the CV, the cri de coeur.”

Recent memoirs have upped the ante, though. What was once a geriatric, self-satisfied genre (politicians, generals and film stars looking back fondly on long careers) is now open to anyone with a story to tell – “nobody memoirs”, the American journalist Lorraine Adams has called them. Candour is the key, no matter how fraught the consequences. “Most writers I know,” Maggie Nelson writes in The Argonauts, “nurse persistent fantasies about the horrible things – or the horrible thing – that will happen to them if and when they express themselves as they desire”. But she takes that risk, addressing the book to “you”, her fluidly gendered husband Harry (who’s angry when she shows him a draft), while exploring identity, pregnancy, motherhood and sexuality.

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JD Vance announces a new memoir about his conversion to Catholicism

The vice-president’s follow-up to Hillbilly Elegy is announced as speculation builds over a 2028 run to succeed Trump

US vice-president JD Vance has announced a new memoir centred on his conversion to Catholicism, adding to mounting speculation about a potential 2028 presidential run.

The book, titled Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, will be published on 16 June by HarperCollins and is described as “a spiritual exploration of what it means to be a Christian across the seasons of Vance’s life”.

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Baldwin by Nicholas Boggs review – the relationships that drove a genius

A new biography puts Baldwin’s sexuality – and the men he loved – front and centre

Today, James Baldwin’s legacy seems assured, but this wasn’t always the case. His critical reputation, already on the wane in his lifetime, declined after his death in 1987. On the publication of the Library of America’s Collected Essays and Early Novels & Stories a decade later, Michael Anderson, writing in the New York Times, complained of his “intellectual flaccidity”. He also dismissed The Fire Next Time – Baldwin’s searing 1963 essay diptych on the US’s legacy of racial injustice – as an overly emotional “period piece”. If such a verdict was out of touch then, six years after the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King, it seems, now, pitifully shortsighted.

An inflection point in the Baldwin revival arrived in the form of Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro (2016), which juxtaposes footage of modern-day protest and racist police violence with clips of Baldwin’s civil rights-era speech­making. It’s an effective technique, capturing Baldwin’s prescience as well as reasserting his rightful place as a key witness to that bloody era (“witness” was Baldwin’s preferred name for the writer-spokesperson-celebrity mantle he had assumed by the mid-60s; a title that captures something of its moral obligation and frustrating passivity).

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Monsters in the Archives by Caroline Bicks review – the writing secrets of Stephen King

A deep dive into the horror novelist’s archives reveals pedantry, penny-pinching, and a total redraft of Carrie

When Caroline Bicks first met Stephen King she was worried. As a teenager she had scared herself silly with his books – Carrie and The Shining were the two that crept under her skin and refused to budge – but now she found herself in the odd position of being Stephen E King professor at the University of Maine. King had endowed the chair at his alma mater in 2016 for the study of literature, and Dr Bicks was a Harvard-trained Shakespeare specialist. What, beyond a name, would they really have in common?

At the time of her appointment, Bicks’s employers had told her not to initiate contact with the famous author in any way. But four years into the job she got a phone call from “Steve” who turned out to be a teddy bear: “I couldn’t believe it. The man responsible for terrifying generations of readers – including me – was so … nice.” Not quite a meet-cute, but promising.

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The Two Roberts by Damian Barr audiobook review – love and lost dreams in bohemian London

This fictionalised account of the relationship between real-life artists Bobby MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun vividly depicts their romance and rise to fame – and the fall from grace that followed

The artists Bobby MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun first met in 1933 as talented young students at the Glasgow School of Art. From that moment on, these two working-class men from Ayrshire lived, worked and loved together at a time when homosexuality was still illegal. Moving to London, they found fame in the art world, where they were nicknamed MacBraque and McPicasso. Against a backdrop of war, they drank, partied, were photographed by Vogue and spent more money than they earned.

In his fictionalised biography, Damian Barr charts the relationship of this largely forgotten pair, which spanned 26 years, drawing on what is known about their lives and work, and using creative licence to fill in the gaps. We first meet them as students lying on a hillside above Glasgow, “curled like commas, naked in the nest they’ve rolled in the high golden grass”. The pair lodge in the attic of a wealthy widow, where they subsist on stew and form a protective barrier around themselves. They are, observes Barr, “as careful as scared people should be”.

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The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby review – the story of the man who changed the world

A journalist charts the progress of AI pioneer Demis Hassabis from child chess prodigy to Nobel prize winner

It was March 2016, and at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, the world was gathered to watch the culmination of a battle 2,500 years in the making. On one side was the South Korean Lee Se-dol, the second-highest ranking Go player in the world. On the other was AlphaGo – a computer program developed by London-based artificial intelligence research company DeepMind.

“Chess is the greatest game mankind has invented,” game designer Alex Randolph once said. “Go is the greatest game mankind has discovered.” Something about the ancient Chinese duel, where players place stones on a grid, trying to capture territory, feels fundamental – inevitable, even. Chess had fallen to the robots nearly 20 years earlier, when DeepBlue beat Kasparov, but Go, with its vast decision space (there are far more legal board positions than atoms in the observable universe) remained a plucky holdout.

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The Last Kings of Hollywood by Paul Fischer review – the rise and reign of Spielberg, Lucas and Coppola

An epic account of how three demigod directors, in pursuit of indie freedom, redefined American film-making

Here we are once more: back to the glory days of the New Hollywood that emerged from the ashes of the old studio system in the 1960s and 70s. Our cast is filled with brilliant hotshots and creative risk-takers, energised by the French New Wave, the American counterculture and the industry’s own amazing entrepreneurial past.

Peter Biskind’s breezy, bleary, cynical book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls ranged freely across the 1970s, with controversial anecdotes about egos and drugs (though maybe the definitive book about the role of cocaine in film production has yet to be written). Mark Harris’s Scenes from a Revolution had the witty idea of looking at the five films Oscar-nominated for best picture in the transitional year of 1968, from the supercool Bonnie and Clyde to the squaresville Dr Doolittle, to see what they told us about America’s cinematic mind at the time.

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Another World by Melvyn Bragg review – portrait of the broadcaster as a young man

Leaving behind Cumbria for Oxford in the late 1950s, Bragg navigates class and culture in a world on the brink of change

It’s October 1958, and a nearly 19-year-old Melvyn Bragg is on the platform at Wigton railway station, saying goodbye to his childhood sweetheart, Sarah. He is off to read history at Wadham College, Oxford, one of the youngest in his cohort because national service is being phased out. Another World starts here, picking up the story left off in Back in the Day, Bragg’s previous memoir about his childhood and youth in this small Cumbrian town.

Oxford to Bragg seems “more a theatre than a city, a spectacle rather than a habitation”. After his prelims, the weeding-out exams in his second term, he is left alone until his finals. He discovers Ingmar Bergman and has many earnest pub conversations about whether Pasternak will get the Nobel prize, or jazz is superior to rock’n’roll. He goes on the Aldermaston march and joins the anti-apartheid movement – although in hindsight he sees this as inspired by a residual faith in empire, with South Africa as Britain’s moral responsibility. Even after Suez, he owns a pencil sharpener in the shape of a globe on which the empire is “a continuous governing blur of pink”.

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