Biography

France’s problems today should lessen the condescension of posterity towards Louis XVI. Presidents of the Republic have proved just as incapable as the King of reforming privileged corporations — stemming the flight of skills and capital — and winning popular confidence. Louis XVI’s failure to manage France after 1789 is easier to understand after reading John Hardman’s complex , well-researched, gripping 500-page biography . Louis XVI’s greatest problem was the French national debt. It had reached four billion livres — accumulated over many wars — and there was an annual deficit of 100 million livres. As a result, Hardman points out, in the 1780s, whereas the British government could borrow at 3.

The Dancing Bees is a romantic title, evoking fantasy and fairy tale rather than scientific rigour, but actually this book is a story of fearsome determination. It is a biography of Karl von Frisch, who discovered the language of the honeybee, but Tania Munz’s account is much more besides, as it reveals the scientist’s struggle for survival under the Nazi regime. Although I kept bees for many years, I had no idea of the work which won Von Frisch a Nobel prize in 1973. I was first introduced to the waggle-dance, this marvel of the animal kingdom, in a laboratory at the University of Sussex. Francis Ratnieks, professor of apiculture, sat me in front of one of his observation hives where you could watch the colony of bees at work through a glass panel.

On 10 April 1772, the biographer James Boswell recorded in his diary that he had hugged himself with pleasure on discovering he would be dining with Oliver Goldsmith. This was not because he hoped to elicit from the Irish-born writer some fruity details for the life of Dr Johnson, the dictionary-maker, that he was planning to write (although Goldsmith did know Johnson intimately). On the contrary, Boswell, the literary groupie, was fascinated by Goldsmith himself. He devotes several pages of his Life of Johnson to him in an attempt ‘to make my readers in some degree acquainted with his singular character’. But, frustratingly, Goldsmith remains an enigmatic figure.

Geoff Andrews’s ‘Shadow Man’, James Klugmann, was the talent-spotter, recruiter and mentor of the Cambridge spy ring. From 1962, aged 21, I stayed frequently at the large north London house where Klugmann (1912–1977) stored the overflow of his vast library. My hosts, who treated me almost as family, were members of the Communist party, as were lots of their friends whom I met. They included a good many of the dramatis personae of Geoff Andrews’s life of Klugmann (as well as several of the Hollywood Ten in exile from McCarthyism; curiously, none of them features in this biography). Klugmann was a party functionary, loved and revered by my hosts and others as the CP’s chief theorist.

The aggressive character of the famous German sports car, in a sort of sympathetic magic, often transfers itself to owner-drivers. The joke goes: ‘When you get into a Porsche, you feel you want to invade Poland.’ In this fascinating and meticulously researched book, Karl Ludvigsen investigates the genetic spiral that gave Porsche cars the character of weaponry. All German manufacturers were forced to supply the Third Reich. The BMW-sponsored London Olympics 2012 were held on a site devastated by Luftwaffe planes powered by its engines.

It seems odd that a singer, musician, television performer and sculptor who typified the 1960s as vividly as Rory McEwen should now be known principally for his botanical paintings. From the early 1950s until his tragically early death in 1982 he was everywhere and knew everyone, but as The Colours of Reality shows, McEwen was never more himself than when working within the discipline and timeless tradition of an art form that links him with the greatest flower painters of the past. Not every botanical painter can count Jim Dine, Joseph Beuys and Ravi Shankar as his friends, play the 12-string guitar, shoot at Balmoral, influence Van Morrison, bolster the fortunes of the Wakefield and North of England Tulip Society and drive a purple Ferrari with ‘Ecosse’ on the tail.

This is an extract from Charles Moore's Notes in this week's Spectator, out tomorrow. Subscribe from just £1. In a few weeks, I shall have finished the second volume of my threepart biography of Margaret Thatcher. I am now at the checking and revising stage — 3,000 endnotes to be made shipshape, 2,000 quotations to be cleared with interviewees, 300,000 words to be re-imagined as if read fresh. This involves the exchange of scores of emails every day. The question arises, ‘How did enterprises of this kind ever happen before computers?’ The answer, I think, is that the sources used were much narrower than they are today. Authors were extremely dependent on where archives physically were. Interviews were a rarity.

Lore has it that those viewing naughty books in the British Museum could once do so only with the Archbishop of Canterbury in attendance. Such pastoral care may be advisable for any institution ending up with the private archive of letters, diaries and artwork from which Joscelyn Godwin compiles this eccentric and nicely produced account of his parents’ lives from 1940 to 1948. Edward Fell Scott-Snell and Stephani Mary Allfree met in 1935 and set about cultivating Thessyros, a fantasy land Edward had already sown with overripe imagery and peopled with priapic cupids, ageing debauchees and, Godwin explains, ‘assorted gardeners, priests, and organists who gleefully seduce their willing, under-aged charges’.

This being the 800th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta, it is not surprising that there should be two new biographies of King John; not surprising either that one should be billed as ‘The Making of a Tyrant’, the other as a story of ‘Treachery’ and ‘Tyranny’. King John has long been regarded as the worst English king: cruel, deceitful, avaricious, untrustworthy, incapable and cowardly. For some of us he remains indelibly the despicable younger brother of Richard the Lionheart, as so memorably portrayed by Claude Rains in the irresistible swashbuckling Errol Flynn movie The Adventures of Robin Hood.

Second world war deception operations are now widely known, particularly those which misled the Germans into thinking that the D-Day Normandy landings were merely a diversion. Great use was made of captured German agents in Britain who sent disinformation about invented army divisions and ships allocated to the supposedly ‘real’ landings still to come. Much less well known, though of arguably equal consequence, was a similar deception operation in the Middle East, based on an MI6 agent known as CHEESE.

It’s a curious subject, fashion, and those who write about it rarely want to jeopardise future access to it on the altar of clear-eyed analysis. The business must pretend that there is a single genius at work here, whose vision creates not just clothes but the things that actually make the money. The catwalk shows are all very well, but they haven’t been the main business for decades, and it came as rather a surprise to the industry when a great mob of new customers emerged from nowhere, the wives of Russian oligarchs and American hedgefund traders, willing to spend six-figure sums every season on a new wardrobe.

In February 1861 a 21-year-old French medievalist called Paul Meyer walked into Sotheby’s auction house near Covent Garden. He had been sent by the Bibliothèque Imperiale to bid on their behalf at the sale of the Savile collection of rare manuscripts, and though he did not have the funds to compete with the big players at the auction, he did at least manage to see, before it disappeared for the next 20 years into the insatiable collector’s maw of Sir Thomas Phillipps, a rhymed verse chronicle of 19,000-odd lines in Norman French that was to become the great obsession of his life.

You can tell a lot about a book from its bibliography. It’s the non-fiction equivalent of skipping to the final page of a novel. Turn to the end of Ian Bostridge’s Schubert’s Winter Journey — a study of the composer’s celebrated song cycle Winterreise — and you’ll find monographs on ornithology, weeping as a cultural phenomenon and wood sculpture in Renaissance Germany, essays on Samuel Beckett and the history of the mail coach, and the rather forbidding ‘Regulation of floral organ abscission in Arabidopsis thaliana’. Intrigued? Who wouldn’t be? As academic disciplines go, musicology was a slow starter.