LIVES WELL LIVED? A pick from biography and memoir

In the winter of 1913, Edward Thomas’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Thomas_(poet)) life was drifting. He was a 34-year-old father of three stuck in an unsatisfying marriage. He had produced 20 books of biography and criticism, and more than 1,500 book reviews, most at high speed. Though The Times had described him as ‘the man with the keys to the Paradise […]

Albert Speer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Speer), Hitler’s pet architect and wartime armaments supremo, has always been regarded differently from the rest of the Fuhrer’s henchmen. The ragbag of embittered veterans and political terrorists, shadows of Hitler himself, had little in common with the respectable and prosperous Speer, too young to have fought in the First World War, too fastidious and

People who met William Golding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Golding) towards the end of his life were often surprised by his appearance. With his deeply creased face and neat white beard, he had the look of an old sea dog about to break into a shanty, or possibly advertise fishfingers, but hardly that of a Nobel laureate who had produced

The last few years have seen a remarkable surge in studies of the Reformation period and this book by Diarmaid MacCulloch  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diarmaid_MacCulloch and http://www.stx.ox.ac.uk/people/fellow/professor-diarmaid-macculloch) makes a further contribution, putting at the centre of the first half of the 16th century Thomas Cranmer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cranmer), the archbishop with the beard who created the Church of England. Cranmer’s beard dominates

That the great are ‘silly like us,’ as Auden said of Yeats, may seem by now a lesson we have learned over and over again. But among the shining dead, there are still a few who seem as though they must have been free of human foolishness. And among the English novelists, the most likely

Reading the hyper-active Pepys in his Diary, is to be absorbed in the sheer confusion of reality. The rush of events is recounted in such detail with such relish – by a man rising from secretary/servant to chief administrator of the Navy – that the mind boggles. Here is this shrewd, alert, impulsive, libidinous, music-loving steward, plagued

‘The best way of lengthening out the rest of our days, old chap, is to finish off our old things’, said the ageing William Morris to his oldest friend and collaborator Edward Burne-Jones (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Burne-Jones). Both were in their sixties; neither would see out the 1890s. Burne-Jones had been designing tapestries and stained glass – sometimes at the rate of

‘If my story were ever to be written down truthfully from start to finish, it would amaze everyone’, wrote Henri Matisse.  It is hard to believe today that Matisse (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matisse and http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/artists/henri-matisse), whose exhibitions draw huge crowds worldwide, was once almost universally reviled and ridiculed. His response was neither to protest nor to retreat; he simply

A fascinating account of piracy, betrayal, and raw survival on the high seas and dry land, Selkirk’s Island rediscovers the amazing tale of an eighteenth-century legend. Born a poor Scotsman, Alexander Selkirk signed with William Dampier, a pirate who was as famous for his self-promotion as for his naval success, on an ill-fated quest to