LIVES WELL LIVED? A pick from biography and memoir

2015 has brought us a whopping, meticulously researched biography of Ted Hughes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_hughes). Academic superstar Jonathan Bate (http://www.jonathanbate.com/) has published extensively on Shakespeare and written the life of John Clare. In Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life he offers what is sure to be the standard biography of Hughes for decades to come. It is also sure […]

Denis Healey (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Healey) died on Saturday (3rd October 2015). He was a British politician of huge gravitas who found himself in government during a highly dangerous time for Britain, economically, in the 1970s. Standardly described as ‘the best Prime Minister Britain never had’, Healey possessed what a great many politicians today lack, namely a hinterland of

In this funny, hard-edged memoir, Mary Karr (http://www.marykarr.com/bio.php), a prize-winning poet and critic, looks back at her upbringing. The setting is a swampy East Texas refinery town in a volatile, defiantly loving family. She recalls her painter mother, seven times married, whose outlaw spirit could tip into psychosis. There is her violent father who spins tales with his

To play snooker at the highest level you would think you’d need an icy, ultra sober, ‘frame’ of mind. To execute shots with millimetre precision for hour after hour – well don’t you need to be someone like Steve Davis? Apparently not, because the sport has offered us wild and flamboyant characters. One was Alex

David Lodge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lodge_(author) and http://literature.britishcouncil.org/david-lodge) novelist, English Literature Professor and literary critic offers a most interesting memoir here. One of the principal themes is inhibition, how you overcome it and the moral and practical consequences of that conquest – a sexual (and also a social and at times an intellectual) journey with, Lodge implies, many

This Life follows the evolution of Dr David Livingstone’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Livingstone) aspirations from his childhood in Blantyre to his death beside a swamp in Central Africa, and finally to his posthumous apotheosis. The author conceals none of Livingstone’s blemishes whether in dealings with his wife and family or in his psychotic approach to those whom he felt had opposed,

Few lives of great men offer so much interest, and so many mysteries, as the life of Charles Darwin. His ideas are still inspiring discoveries and controversies more than a hundred years after his death. Many believe him simply to be the greatest figure of nineteenth-century science. Janet Browne (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Browne and http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hsdept/bios/browne.html) offers a vivid and comprehensive picture of Darwin

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