Biography & Memoir

For the hospital, and for the NHS, it was a closed case, another preventable death: medicine is imperfect, such things happen. I couldn’t accept that. Looking back, I was setting the immeasurable private...

Stein loved the idea that writing might have esoteric meanings but that those meanings would be only faintly perceived by the abstract reader, that a text could simultaneously be plain while explaining...

From the MAGA perspective, snitching is the pejorative liberal word for the exercise of grassroots democracy needed to keep bureaucrats honest and put phoneys from the ‘woke’ intelligentsia in their...

Richard Ellmann saw himself as emulating Joyce: the main job of the biographer was less a matter of ‘observing’ than of ‘ferreting’, which was also the word he used to describe ‘Joyce’s habit...

In the de-Sturgeonisation process that took place in the wake of her resignation, the narrative was rewritten. Her relatability, gravitas and high approval ratings were forgotten; her managerialism, insularity...

Many birders spend long days in nature looking for an example of a particular species, and then, on finding it, do nothing. They just jot something down, or maybe take a photograph. This makes their fervour,...

I’d been told in no uncertain terms at the ‘technical briefing’, even if you think you’re a good driver, even if you passed your test thirty years ago and have more than a million kilometres of...

From 1935 to 1939, Flanagan ran the most extraordinary of stage ventures. The Federal Theatre Project, set up under FDR’s New Deal to give work to unemployed theatre practitioners, produced more than...

It was our first visit to Kansas City since before the election and the rectory seemed to have grown smaller, darker, dingier. The Trump flag hanging in the alcove where we used to smoke with the seminarian;...

Stephen Hawking may have been a genius, but ‘Roger Penrose’s insights seem to stem from some superhuman life-form’; his mathematics has something ‘magical’ about it. His scientific credentials...

Christopher Hill devoted his attention almost exclusively to 17th-century England; he wrote far more about intellectual and religious history than political history; he re-created the world of those who...

Francis’s continual emphasis on mercy – ‘the first attribute of God’ – explains his papal choices more clearly than the progressive/conservative heuristic. It is the reason he wanted a church...

The diaries filled me with nostalgia for all the bollocks we had to listen to back in the day; the interminable wrangle about whether women could even do ... um ... art, which in those days was a concept...

You did not need to have met Albert Barnes for him to take against you. In late 1927 Ford Madox Ford, then in New York, telegraphed for permission to visit the foundation. Barnes cabled back: ‘Would...

The story of the Barclay brothers’ rise is ‘the story of modern Britain’, and they were certainly creatures of the 1980s, with their highly leveraged takeovers of old, lumbering companies they would...

In the new memoir as well as in L’Étoile rose Fernandez insists on the political dimension of homosexuality, the obligation it brings to question every value, and expresses disdain for those gay men...

 The only rule of a tale is that everything gets used, even apparently superfluous details – though you’re allowed entirely superfluous ogres because ogres are cool. It’s a world of wishes and wonders,...

Masayoshi Son seems compulsively driven to invest larger and larger sums so he can call himself the biggest, most significant, most visionary investor in the world. ‘Bill Gates just started Microsoft...