Biography & Memoir

The man in whose image North Korea was made was formed in very particular circumstances. Over a life corresponding closely to Eric Hobsbawm’s short 20th century, Kim Il-sung faced both the modernity...

Mother had wanted the social gift of Eton, so Mother reaped the social gift of Eton. Mother wanted. So she could be correspondingly disappointed. What did Father want? 

Joyce stands out​ among the great modernist writers for his belief in tolerance, equality, democracy, progress and the preciousness of the everyday. If he is outrageously experimental, he is also...

As one half of the independent press Allison & Busby, Margaret Busby published writers including Buchi Emecheta, Roy Heath and John Edgar Wideman, helping books to move across national borders. In...

Malachi Whitaker’s father, a bookbinder, was her earliest patron and critic. He paid sixpence for her first poem, but dismissed her second: ‘You’re too late, lass. Shakespeare said this...

Nearly fifteen years after Girls, the way Lena Dunham embodied the character of Hannah Horvath doesn’t seem like a confession, an outrage or a gimmick, but an articulation of girlhood. Through her,...

Recently​ I had an opportunity to check in on the state of American Catholicism. The occasion was a tradcath wedding in St Louis, greyscale city of my teenage years, and the last place I truly believed...

Working at George, JFK Jr’s magazine, was never dull, despite the contradictions emanating from the editor-in-chief – and often because of them. For many of the staff, it became a life. Towards...

Harrison’s life and career were part of the postwar flowering of the avant-garde, which reached its apotheosis in the 1970s. Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow won the National...

Being underestimated​ was Indira Gandhi’s chief political asset. The Congress elders who helped her become India’s third prime minister in 1966 imagined that they were installing a pliable...

When​ Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman died in 1997, having suffered a brain haemorrhage in the pool of the Paris Ritz, the tributes divided into accounts of a harsh life powered by sex,...

‘The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced,’ Willa Cather wrote. ‘It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis...

Huey​ Long – Louisiana’s legendary governor, senator and would-be presidential candidate – loved the campaign trail. ‘Watch me vaudeville ’em,’ he would...

Brown’s premiership was left as a bit of a mystery: an example of formidable talent, experience and hard work somehow not being enough; and of a politician highly successful at reducing poverty...

A girl doesn’t have to fall into Epstein’s clutches to see sexual abuse up close, and if she gets through childhood without experiencing it, she will probably find out that some close friend...

With some people, money and sex are the only truths. It’s the ultimate delinquency to believe that gratification itself is power. When a lazy aristocrat from a dying dynasty uses a helicopter to...

As Stephen Greenblatt’s Dark Renaissance shows despite itself, it is not Marlowe’s life story that we still need, but his plays and poems: we might well want to avert our eyes from the bathetically...

Since her death, much of what was said by and about Brigitte Bardot feels even less trustworthy than it was in her lifetime. In her early career she was surrounded by ‘a tremendous cloud of ballyhoo’,...