LIVES WELL LIVED? A pick from biography and memoir

In middle age, Barbara Ehrenreich (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Ehrenreich and http://barbaraehrenreich.com/) came across the journal she had kept during her tumultuous adolescence and set out to reconstruct that quest, which had taken her to the study of science and through a cataclysmic series of uncanny – or as she later learned to call them, “mystical”-experiences. A staunch atheist and […]

Penelope Fitzgerald (1916–2000, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penelope_Fitzgerald ) was a great English writer, who would never have described herself in such grand terms. Her novels were short, spare masterpieces, self-concealing, oblique and subtle. She won the Booker Prize for her novel Offshore in 1979, and her last work, The Blue Flower (first published 1995), was acclaimed as a work

John Carey (http://www.johncarey.org/about.html), English professor at Oxford, controversial commentator, book critic and beekeeper, reflects on a life immersed in literature, from grammar school beginnings to the Oxford establishment. Best-known for his provocative take on cultural issues in The Intellectuals and the Masses and What Good Are the Arts?, John Carey describes in this warm and

Poet, lexicographer, critic, moralist, Dr. Samuel Johnson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Johnson) had in his friend James Boswell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_boswell and http://www.jamesboswell.info/) the ideal biographer. Notoriously and self-confessedly intemperate (he availed himself of massive quantities of drink and prostitutes galore), Boswell shared with Johnson a huge appetite for life and threw equal energy into recording its every aspect in minute but telling detail.

Primo Levi’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primo_levi) account of his time in Auschwitz, If This Is a Man , (first published in 1947 in Italian as ‘Se questo è un uomo’ ), made him one of the first writers to document the Holocaust and it established his name around the world. But Levi was not just a writer. He

In 1929 Robert Graves (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Graves) went to live abroad permanently, vowing ‘never to make England my home again’. This is his superb account of his life up until that ‘bitter leave-taking’: from his childhood and desperately unhappy school days at Charterhouse, to his time serving as a young officer in the First World War that was

This volume contains both parts of Muggeridge’s  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Muggeridge and http://www.malcolmmuggeridge.org/) acclaimed memoir – The Green Stick (1972) and The Infernal Grove (1973), plus the start to an unfinished third volume entitled The Right Eye. An international throng of writers, politicians, soldiers, spies, traitors and eccentrics jostles in these page from Attlee to Wodehouse via Burgess and Philby, Churchill,

An autobiography from 1982 delivered with the charm and gentle irony that became the trademark of this famously well travelled documentary maker (http://www.alanwhicker.co.uk/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Whicker) 390 pages in Elm Tree Books ISBN 978-0241107478   Alan Whicker

Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Hugh_Clough) trod that ever- so-delicate path between faith and doubt that 20th century philosopher Anthony Kenny came to do himself. Both also had a connection with Liverpool and Balliol College. Kenny has immersed himself in the mind of Clough in order to deliver this ‘life’. He regards Clough’s religious verse as the finest

Born in 1872, son of Viscount Amberley, and heir to the Russell Earldom, Bertrand Russell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell and http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/russell/) was to become one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. His early masterpiece Principia Mathematica,  set the course for the modern and post modern preoccupation with language; its philosophical ambitions are what drew Ludwig Wittgenstein from Vienna to

James Joyce by Richard Ellmann (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Ellmann) was published in 1959 (a revised edition was released in 1982). It is widely accepted as a masterpiece of literary biography. Anthony Burgess (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Burgess) was so impressed with the biographer’s work that he claimed it to be ‘the greatest literary biography of the century’. The levels of research that went into

Bernard Crick’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Crick) biography puts the many forces that shaped Orwell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell and http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Author/AuthorPage/0,,1000012316,00.html and http://georgeorwellnovels.com/biography-of-george-orwell/) into perspective. More than anything else Orwell feared the state. As an outgrowth of this fear, Orwell dissected propaganda and exposed the many ways in which language can be made a tool of tyranny. While he is known mainly for 1984 and Animal

A fine biography from 1952 of Stanley Baldwin (1867 – 1947 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Baldwin and http://www.biography.com/people/stanley-baldwin-9196751), the only British Prime Minister to serve under three monarchs (George V, Edward VIII and George VI).  He was in office in new and difficult conditions: the onset of modern democratic politics, the rise of Labour, chronic economic depression, the General Strike, persistent newspaper