Death is something that happens to other people: and hence, it might be inferred, the popularity of biography. Those whose lives are recorded die in the last chapter: the rest of us live for ever. The point was made by Lucretius in his long poem On the Nature of Things (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura), which was intended to […]

The definitive scholarly biography of Charlotte Bronte (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Bront%C3%AB). Winifred Gerin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winifred_Gerin) sticks as closely as possible to Charlotte Bronte’s own words, as found in her letters and other writings. A must read for all those captivated by the author of  Jane Eyre (1847). 656 pages in Oxford paperback edition ISBN 978-0198811527 Charlotte Bronte

The long-awaited literary biography of the supreme ‘poets’ poet’. John Clare (1793-1864, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Clare) is the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self, but until now he has never been the subject of a comprehensive

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