Category Biography books

Auto Added by WPeMatico

After Oscar by Merlin Holland review – Wilde’s grandson on the legacy of a scandal

The playwright’s only living descendant traces the shadow cast by his trial – and his rehabilitation as a gay icon

Today, Oscar Wilde is one of the most celebrated writers in English, both instantly recognisable and actually read. His plays are performed. His words are quoted. He reclines in effigy on both the Strand and the King’s Road. He even has a commemorative window in Westminster Abbey. But it was not always so.

When he died in Paris, in 1900, aged just 46, the obituaries were not generous. There was a feeling of relief that an embarrassing figure had been removed the scene, and a general hope that he and his works would soon be forgotten. The Pall Mall Gazette suggested that nothing he wrote had “the strength to endure”.

Continue reading...

The Boundless Deep by Richard Holmes review – wild times with young Tennyson

A masterful account of the poet’s early life during the tumultuous 19th century crisis of faith

Alfred Tennyson was a divided soul. He even wrote a poem called The Two Voices in which dual versions of himself argued out the pros and cons of suicide. In this illuminating book, Richard Holmes has chosen to focus on the lesser known of the poet’s personae.

The year 1850 was pivotal for Tennyson. He published the great poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for nearly two decades. He became, as a result, both famous and rich. He got married, after a 14‑year courtship. He had been living in rented homes with his mother and siblings, or dossing down with bachelor friends in London, or lurking alone in a ramshackle cottage on one of his native Lincolnshire’s bleak beaches. Now he took a house where he could receive distinguished visitors. (When Prince Albert came calling, Tennyson was so far from obsequious that he forgot to invite the queen’s consort to sit down, though he did at least offer the poor man a drink.) He was appointed poet laureate. His life as a Great Man began.

Continue reading...

Death of an Ordinary Man by Sarah Perry review – a brilliant meditation on mortality

The Essex Serpent author offers a moving account of her father-in-law’s final illness that will resonate widely

The novelist Sarah Perry’s father-in-law, David, died of oesophageal cancer in 2022. This book tells the story of his dying, from the last time she saw him well, on a trip to Great Yarmouth at the end of summer, to his death less than two months later, just nine days after being diagnosed.

It’s not easy to account for what makes this book so special. Its main character is as unpromisingly ordinary as its title suggests, and some may even find him a little boring. David Perry is the kind of man who spends hours sorting his beloved stamp collection into albums with the aid of long-tipped forceps and magnifying glasses, or filling in his Sudoku puzzle books, or reading the latest copy of the Antiques Gazette, looking intently at porcelain dogs and chased silver punch-bowls.

Continue reading...

‘There was comedy at all times’: Andrew O’Hagan on 15 years of funny, frank and champagne-fuelled friendship with Edna O’Brien

In the last decades of her life, the two novelists became close friends. He recalls their intense bond, their last trip to Ireland and her memories of being romanced by Richard Burton

I first met Edna O’Brien on a mild spring evening in 2009. There had been a party to celebrate the 70th birthday of Seamus Heaney and I was running late, so I put up my hand for a taxi and a rumbling black cab drew to a halt. The door swung open and Edna stepped on to the pavement like Ophelia out of the weedy brook. She was a vision in black velvet and volumised hair. She paid at the window, clearly irked after some altercation with the driver, and when she turned she immediately took my hand and offered a Joycean, or possibly a Glaswegian, effusion.

“I fucking hate the English. Do you?”

Continue reading...

107 Days by Kamala Harris review – no closure, no hope

The former presidential candidate sticks to the script in a memoir that will only cause further bad blood

Almost a year after the 2024 election there are still some houses with “Harris” signs in their windows dotted around my liberal Philadelphia neighbourhood. The result left many people in a state of shock and denial, unable to process exactly what went wrong.

No one was more shocked than Kamala Harris, whose inner circle had been confident on election night that they’d eked out a win during the whirlwind campaign. Cupcakes with “Madam President” toppings were ready to go; champagne on ice. “It says a lot about how traumatized we both were by what happened that night that [my husband] Doug and I never discussed it with each other until I sat down to write this book,” Harris reveals in her new memoir, which functions as a political postmortem.

Continue reading...

From a new Thomas Pynchon novel to a memoir by Margaret Atwood: the biggest books of the autumn

Essays from Zadie Smith; Wiki founder Jimmy Wales on how to save the internet; a future-set novel by Ian McEwan; a new case for the Slow Horses - plus memoirs from Kamala Harris and Paul McCartney… all among this season’s highlights

Helm by Sarah Hall
Faber, out now
Hall is best known for her glittering short stories: this is the novel she’s been working on for two decades. Set in Cumbria’s Eden valley, it tells the story of the Helm – the only wind in the UK to be given a name – from its creation at the dawn of time up to the current degradation of the climate. It’s a huge, millennia-spanning achievement, spotlighting characters from neolithic shamans to Victorian meteorologists to present-day pilots.

Continue reading...

Chasing the Dark by Ben Machell review – the original ghostbuster

An entrancing biography of Tony Cornell, who displayed a scientist’s commitment to impartiality as he investigated the paranormal

My first and only experience with a Ouija board occurred when I was 11, at a friend’s house. It was good, spooky fun until it wasn’t. I recall movement and the start of a message before we recoiled from the board. Later that evening, I learned that my grandfather had died. While I realise now that a boy with a terminally ill relative and a lurid imagination was not the most reliable witness, I remember wanting to believe that I’d had a brush with the uncanny.

When Times journalist Ben Machell’s dying grandmother bequeathed him a crystal ball, he began idly searching for mediums and happened across the work of a man named Tony Cornell. Between 1952 and 2004, Cornell worked (unpaid and to the detriment of two marriages) for the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Weeding out deception and delusion from accounts of paranormal activity to find out what, if anything, remained, Britain’s most diligent parapsychologist was more claims adjuster than ghostbuster. His answering machine filled up with pleas to investigate strange happenings around the country: a trawlerman mauled by an invisible hound, a house that bled water, a rural bungalow plagued by fires and expiring pets.

Continue reading...

Alexandrian Sphinx by Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis review – the mysterious life of Constantine Cavafy

The enigmatic queer poet admired by EM Forster and Jackie Onassis takes centre stage in this unconventional biography

The second floor of 10 Rue Lepsius, tucked away in the old Greek quarter of Alexandria above a brothel, was, for three decades, the literary focal point of the city. Entering the apartment, out of the Mediterranean sun, visitors would need a minute to adjust to the dimness, gradually perceiving faded curtains and heavy furniture, every surface covered with antiques and whimsical objects. There was no electricity, only candlelight. The host, proffering morsels of bread and cheese from the shadows, was an older man with “enigmatic eyes” beneath round spectacles – the poet Constantine Cavafy.

What kind of person might be discerned amid the gloom? This is what Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis set out to discover in their deeply researched and engaging biography, the first for 50 years. They brilliantly recreate his world – two chapters about Alexandria are especially good – and investigate his place within it. Cavafy, whose admirers and champions included WH Auden, EM Forster, David Hockney and Jackie Onassis, has remained enigmatic since his death at 70 in 1933. Surprisingly, for a poet who never sold a book in his lifetime – and instead circulated broadsheets, pamphlets and sewn notebooks, building his reputation poem by poem – he now has “a global audience he could never have imagined”, thanks to poems such as The City, Waiting for the Barbarians and Ithaca, which Onassis asked to be read at her funeral.

Continue reading...

The end of the road? What The Salt Path scandal means for the nature memoir

It wasn’t the first hit memoir to tell a story of redemption inspired by the great outdoors – but could it become one of the last? Authors and publishers assess the damage

When The Salt Path came out in 2018, it was a publishing phenomenon, going on to sell more than 2m copies globally. As even those who haven’t read it are likely to know by now, the book charted Raynor Winn and her husband Moth’s emotionally and physically transformative long-distance walk along the South West Coast Path in the wake of utter disaster: a financial collapse that cost them their home, and Moth’s diagnosis with an incurable neurological disorder. Winn followed it with two further books in a similar vein, The Wild Silence and Landlines, also bestsellers. Earlier this year came a film of The Salt Path, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs. That original book by a first-time writer had become what writers, editors and booksellers all dream of: a bestselling, spin-off generating brand.

But it wasn’t the first nature memoir to top the charts, by any means. In 2012, Wild by Cheryl Strayed described the 26-year‑old’s hike across the west coast of America in the wake of her mother’s death and the end of her marriage, and after soaring up the book charts it was made into a film starring Reese Witherspoon two years later. That same year, H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald was a surprise bestseller, telling the story of a year spent training a Eurasian goshawk as a journey through grief after the death of their father. In 2016, Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun saw her return to the sheep farm on Orkney where she’d grown up in order to recover from addiction through contact with nature; it was also recently filmed, with Saoirse Ronan in the lead role. Meanwhile, in last year’s bestselling Raising Hare, foreign policy adviser Chloe Dalton describes moving to the countryside, rescuing a leveret and rediscovering her relationship with the land.

Continue reading...

Gwyneth: The Biography by Amy Odell review – Gwyn and bear it

There’s glamour, Goop and ghosting in this an unsparing account of Paltrow’s world

Gwyneth: The Biography opens, where else, with the vaginal egg, an episode that has come to stand for Paltrow’s general ability to sell dumb ideas to credulous rich women using widespread mockery as her marketing rocket fuel. (In case you need a reminder: this was the $66 jade egg Paltrow sold via her lifestyle brand Goop that promised various health benefits upon insertion.) Amy Odell’s book, billed as delivering “insight and behind-the-scenes details of Paltrow’s relationships, family, friendships, iconic films”, as well as her creation of Goop, takes no particular stand on this, nor on many of Paltrow’s more divisive episodes, instead offering us what feels like an earnest jog back through the actor and wellness guru’s years of fame. The author writes in the acknowledgments that she spoke to 220 people for the book, in which case we have to assume that a great many of them had little to say.

To be fair to Odell, whose previous biography was of Anna Wintour, another difficult and controlling subject – although Wintour did give Odell some access – Paltrow’s world is notoriously hard to break into if she’s not on board with a project; the author quotes numerous hacks tasked with profiling Paltrow for magazines who found themselves iced out of her networks, and the same happens to her in the early stages of research. Odell’s task only gets harder in the second half of the book, which tackles the Goop years. Since, she claims, many of its staff signed NDAs, those sections lack even the modest stream of gossip that enlivens the first half.

Continue reading...