Biography

Saturday

Gilbert Adair

No body in the library

The opening paragraph of Duchess of Death’s fourth chapter, in which its subject is about to have her first whodunit published, begins thus: The opening paragraph of Duchess of Death’s fourth chapter, in which its subject is about to have her first whodunit published, begins thus: September 25, 1919. John Lane was very pleased with himself as he leaned into the mirror over the sink in his bathroom and examined his beard. Using a small pair of manicure scissors, which he was barely able to handle with his too-chubby fingers, he snipped at a few stray hairs. And, four lines later in the same faux- finicky vein, the paragraph ends: ‘Yes, he was very pleased.

Saturday

Ian Dunlop

The perfect stranger

There are an estimated 417,000 people in the UK suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and double that number suffering from other forms of dementia. There are an estimated 417,000 people in the UK suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and double that number suffering from other forms of dementia. Potentially there are a large number of readers for John Suchet’s touchingly honest account of his wife’s slide into dementia, but — and here is the irony — it will not be the victims themselves of these diseases who will perhaps find comfort or insight from his book but the million or more carers who look after them. John Suchet is a famous television journalist and former newscaster for ITV.

Saturday

Florence Odonoghue

A cousin across the water

Though he was to live at Castle Leslie in Co. Monaghan, Sir John Randalph (later Shane) Leslie, cousin of Winston Churchill, was born at Stratford House, London, in 1885 though baptised at Glaslough with Lord Randolph Churchill as godfather. Though he was to live at Castle Leslie in Co. Monaghan, Sir John Randalph (later Shane) Leslie, cousin of Winston Churchill, was born at Stratford House, London, in 1885 though baptised at Glaslough with Lord Randolph Churchill as godfather. After Eton and King’s, Cambridge, Shane, at Churchill’s bidding, stood as a Home Ruler for Londonderry City in both the 1910 general elections.

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Learning to live with the bomb

The call consisted of three short blows of breath. A minute later, the phone rang again. Once more: three short blows of breath. Mr Cowell, under diplomatic cover, was the MI6 handler for Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, the West’s single most important asset in the Kremlin — and the calls he took were the prearranged code that Penkovsky was to use to tell him that a Soviet nuclear attack on the West was imminent. I’d have shat a brick. Wouldn’t you? But Cowell kept his cool. He didn’t call London and get the counterstrike underway. He didn’t put his head between his knees and wait for oblivion. The sky could have been black with Russian nukes, but he didn’t, in fact, do a damn thing.

Eric Christiansen

Hunting and working

Why are scholars so prone to melancholy? According to the expert, Robert Burton of Christ Church, it is because ‘they live a sedentary, solitary life... Why are scholars so prone to melancholy? According to the expert, Robert Burton of Christ Church, it is because ‘they live a sedentary, solitary life... free from bodily exercise and those ordinary disports that other men use.’ Not this one. The most remarkable characteristic of the young and maturing Trevor-Roper was his frenzied pursuit of foxes and hares on horse and foot, and his capacity for long marches through Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire and the Borders in search of spiritual refreshment or a rendez-vous with a horse. Riding to hounds several days a week, or once a week in wartime, occupied many daylight hours.

Giles Foden

The lure of adventure

A few minutes’ walk from Paddington Station is a drinking den and restaurant called the Frontline Club, a members’ club for foreign correspondents. A few minutes’ walk from Paddington Station is a drinking den and restaurant called the Frontline Club, a members’ club for foreign correspondents. Among the characters you might find banging on the bar, wedged between Rick Beeston of the Times, Jason Burke of the Observer, and gentleman freelancers such as Aidan Hartley or Sam Kiley, is James Brabazon, an award-winning documentary filmmaker specialising in war zones. Though there are plenty of female stars, such as the redoubtable Marie Colvin, with her fantastic hair and piratical eye-patch, this is still a fairly macho world.

Saturday

Matthew Dennison

More than a painter of Queens

The last words of Hungarian-born portraitist Philip de László, spoken to his nurse, were apparently, ‘It is a pity, because there is so much still to do.’ As Duff Hart-Davis’s biography amply demonstrates, for de László, art — which he regarded as ‘work’ as much as an aesthetic vocation — was both the purpose and the substance of his life. The last words of Hungarian-born portraitist Philip de László, spoken to his nurse, were apparently, ‘It is a pity, because there is so much still to do.

Nicholas Haslam

Schlock teaser

The somewhat straightlaced theatre-going audiences of 1880s America, eager for performances by European artistes like Jenny Lind and solid, home-grown, classical actors such as Otis Skinner, were hardly prepared for the on-stage vulgarity that the (usually) Russian and Polish immigrant impressarios, with their particular nous for show-biz, were to unleash into the saloons and fleapits across the young nation.

Ian Thomson

A flammable individual

On the night of 18 October 1969, thieves broke into the Oratory of San Lorenzo, Palermo, and removed Caravaggio’s Nativity. On the night of 18 October 1969, thieves broke into the Oratory of San Lorenzo, Palermo, and removed Caravaggio’s Nativity. The altarpiece has not been seen since. Three decades later, in 1996, Italians were aghast when the Mafia claimed responsibility. Somewhere in the Sicilian capital of Palermo, it seemed, a gangland capo sat in awed admiration of the stolen Christmas canvas. Far from submerging rivals in wet concrete, now the Cosa Nostra were enthusiasts of 17th century religious art. Born in 1571 near Milan, Caravaggio was a flammable individual.

Saturday

Charlotte Moore

A tireless campaigner

Why haven’t we heard of Phillis Bottome? In her 60-year career she published 33 novels, several of them bestsellers, short stories, essays, biographies and memoirs. Why haven’t we heard of Phyllis Bottome? In her 60-year career she published 33 novels, several of them bestsellers, short stories, essays, biographies and memoirs. She lectured widely in Britain and America. She was translated into nine languages. Her 1937 novel The Mortal Storm predicted the horrific consequences of Fascism. MGM made a film of it, starring James Stewart — the studio’s first openly anti-Nazi film. It premiered in America in 1940, just as Hitler’s troops entered Paris, and was arguably influential in persuading the US to abandon its isolationist stance.

Patrick Skene-Catling

High priest of bop

In the Rainbow Grill in New York one evening in 1971, according to Robin D. G. Kelley, Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Southern California, Duke Ellington  halted his band in mid-flow and announced: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the baddest left hand in the history of jazz just walked into the room, Mr Thelonious Monk.' In the Rainbow Grill in New York one evening in 1971, according to Robin D. G. Kelley, Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Southern California, Duke Ellington  halted his band in mid-flow and announced: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the baddest left hand in the history of jazz just walked into the room, Mr Thelonious Monk.’ In the code of jive talk, ‘baddest’ meant the best.

Saturday

William Waldegrave

Almost a great man

Of those prime ministers whom the old grammar schools escalator propelled from the bottom to the top of British society since the second world war, Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher were in many ways the most alike. Wilson, that classic greasy-pole climber, tactically brilliant, strategically trivial; Major, decent, straightforward, a good man lifted to power on the shoulders of his many friends as a healer who could unite: both these are types, the one less admirable than the other, but familiar to history. Heath and Thatcher are much odder, more dangerous and more remarkable. It is an extraordinary tribute to the modern Conservative Party that both chose it as the instrument through which to try to deliver their radical visions — as it is to the party that it chose them.

John Preston

Odd men out

The first game played by the Allahakbarries Cricket Club at Albury in Surrey in September 1887 did not bode well for the club’s future. The first game played by the Allahakbarries Cricket Club at Albury in Surrey in September 1887 did not bode well for the club’s future. One player turned up wearing pyjamas, another held the bat the wrong way round while a third — a Frenchman — thought the game had finished every time the umpire called ‘Over’. The Allahakbarries were skittled out for just 11 runs and under the circumstances it seemed entirely appropriate that the team’s name should have been derived from the Moorish phrase for ‘Heaven Help Us’. However, the team’s captain, the playwright, J. M.

Chris Mullin

Keeping the lid on

For all of the nine years that he worked, first as official spokesman for Tony Blair and then as Director of Communications for the government, Alastair Campbell was obliged to defend a huge lie: that all was well at the heart of the New Labour project when, manifestly, it was not. Gradually, as the years passed, the tensions surfaced and whispers that something was amiss reached the outside world, but by and large — and in no small measure due to the extraordinary resilience of Blair and Campbell — the lid was kept on. Until now. The fault lines are apparent from the outset. This volume covers the three years from the day of John Smith’s death on 12 May 1994 to the triumphal progress to Downing Street on 1 May 1997.

Dan Jones

A rather orthodox doxy

‘His cursed concubine.’ That was the imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys’ judgment on Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn. ‘His cursed concubine.’ That was the imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys’ judgment on Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn. And that was mild. The abbot of Whitby called Anne a ‘common stud whore’. The judge Sir John Spelman noted during her trial that ‘there never was such a whore in the realm’. And, of course, Henry VIII beheaded her. Anne, rather like our own Diana, caught some heavy flak for having a sexy reputation.

Saturday

A.N. Wilson

Mystery of the empty tomb

John Henry Newman was an electrifying personality who has attracted numerous biographers and commentators. John Cornwell, in his excellent guided tour around this well-ploughed field, recalls the young woman in Oxford in the 1830s who ‘wept with emotion’ at Newman’s very appearance. W. G. Ward recalls the awe which fell upon him and his undergraduate friends if Newman so much as passed them in the street. And figures such as Mark Pattison, James Anthony Froude and Matthew Arnold, none of them followers of the Newman cult in grown-up life, recollected similar feelings in their youth. When the mature George Eliot read Newman’s spiritual autobiography, she said it ‘breathed much life into me’.

Philip Ziegler

Golden youth or electric eel?

Patrick Shaw-Stewart was the cleverest and the most ambitious of the gilded gang of young men who swam in the wake of the not-so-young but perennially youthful Raymond Asquith. Julian Gren- fell, Duff Cooper, Charles Lister, Edward Horner: they were as one in their conviction that the British were superior to other races, that public schoolboys were superior to other Britons, that Etonians were superior to other public schoolboys, and that their own precious clique was superior to other Etonians. Apart from that, the only obligatory common factor was that one should love, or at least profess to love, Lady Diana Manners. The corrupt coterie, as they proudly styled themselves, knew that they were the future. They had no future.

Richard Shone

Painting the town together

This book recounts a terrible story of self-destruction by two painters who, in their heyday, achieved considerable renown in Britain and abroad. Robert Colquhoun (1914-62) and Robert MacBryde (1913-66), both from Scottish working-class families, met in 1932 when they were students at the Glasgow School of Art. From then onwards they were personally and professionally inseparable in their headlong rise to fame and descent downhill. Although both have been the subject of anecdotes and snapshots in many a memoir of the period — all those accounts of Soho and ‘Fitzrovia’ — this is the first full-length study devoted to them, the result of over 20 years’ research.

Saturday

Simon Courtauld

Cherchez la femme

The 22nd Earl of Erroll, Military Secretary in Kenya in the early part of the second world war, was described by two of his fellow peers of the realm as ‘a stoat — one of the great pouncers of all time’ and ‘a dreadful shit who really needed killing’. The 22nd Earl of Erroll, Military Secretary in Kenya in the early part of the second world war, was described by two of his fellow peers of the realm as ‘a stoat — one of the great pouncers of all time’ and ‘a dreadful shit who really needed killing’.

Lewis Jones

Blood relatives

The last time I saw Benazir Bhutto was at Oxford, over champagne outside the Examination Schools, when she inquired piercingly of a subfusc linguist, ‘Racine? What is Racine?’ Older and richer than most undergraduates, and as a Harvard graduate presumably better educated, she was already world famous, and was obviously not at Oxford to learn about classical tragedy. The last time I saw Benazir Bhutto was at Oxford, over champagne outside the Examination Schools, when she inquired piercingly of a subfusc linguist, ‘Racine? What is Racine?’ Older and richer than most undergraduates, and as a Harvard graduate presumably better educated, she was already world famous, and was obviously not at Oxford to learn about classical tragedy.