LIVES WELL LIVED? A pick from biography and memoir

No-one who has relished reading  A Dance to the Music of Time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dance_to_the_Music_of_Time) will want to miss this monumental biography of Anthony Powell. Hilary Spurling (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/apr/17/hilary-spurling-biographer-pearl-buck) lets us in on a huge amount of interesting detail about the novelist. There is the Eton schoolboy and Oxford undergraduate, a Parisian prostitute, Nina Hamnett (the artist’s model painted by […]

In September 2017 I had the privilege of fulfilling a long standing ambition. I visited Dr Johnson’s House in Gough Square, London. (http://www.drjohnsonshouse.org/) Having enjoyed his essays and literary criticism for 35 years, it’s plain to me the man had more wit, style and humanity than many civilizations I could name.  To immerse yourself in

Most of us have a picture of the Victorians in our minds. Straight-laced (on the surface). Women bound into suffocating corsets. Piano legs covered for the sake of decency. Industrious pioneers in science and technology. Innovative creators of our railway system. Capitalists. Ruthless exploiters of the industrial poor whilst at the same time being great

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi (http://paulkalanithi.com/bio/) was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling to live. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a medical student asking

Much as life in Lanark and dear old Blighty is unsatisfactory we do not fear being snatched away to a detention centre and tortured because the government does not share our opinions. There are, of course, plenty of regimes in this world where that is the case. In 1990, Jaballa Matar, an exiled Lybian dissident

If it’s possible to be luminous and dark at the same time then Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859) fits the bill. He always stood aside from the curriculum approved parade of literary greats whom it was our duty to read and revere at school. The A-Level Summer reading list of 150 titles nowhere featured Confessions of