Biography

Can there really be any point in yet another fat book about one of the Mitford sisters? Their antics have been appearing in print since the late 1940s, when the eldest – clever, waspish Nancy – displayed their family eccentricities in her sparkling novel The Pursuit of Love. Since then, by a rough count, there have been 15 biographies, individual and joint, including three of both Nancy and Jessica, two vast compendiums of correspondence and five autobiographies by four of the sisters (Jessica wrote two).

On 7 December 2015 the Kennedy Centre Honours were awarded to Carole King, George Lucas, Rita Moreno, Seiji Ozawa and Cicely Tyson. King sat by the White House Christmas tree during the afternoon reception wearing her medal and laughing as Barack Obama recited the most familiar of her thousands of song lines: ‘You make me feel like a natural woman.’ Obama grinned: ‘I think I just became the first president ever to say that... It sounded better when Aretha said it.’ That evening the tribute to King as a singer-songwriter included performances from James Taylor and the cast of the Broadway spectacular Beautiful: The Carole King Musical and concluded with an astounding performance by Aretha Franklin of ‘(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman’.

‘He was the true Willy Wonka of film-making – I feel like I won the golden ticket getting the chance to work with him!’ The speaker is Lara Flynn Boyle, who played Donna Hayward, the friend of the murdered Laura Palmer in David Lynch’s small-screen masterpiece Twin Peaks. That comparison, cited in John Higgs’s terrifically lucid and compact study of the filmmaker, who died in January, aged 78, is rather brilliant.

Film noir was the term coined by the French in the late 1940s to describe the genre of Hollywood crime movies which probed the darkness that lay in the shadows cast by all that bright Californian sunlight. The Beach Boys, who broke through in the early 1960s with a repertoire that hymned, in five-part harmonies, the Golden State’s promise of sun, sand and waves, bronzed bodies, beach-party ‘babes’, hot rods and open highways, were – and remain – the quintessential Californian band. But their story, an unhappy family saga featuring the three Wilson brothers (Brian, Carl and Dennis) and cousin Mike Love, is, like that of California’s itself, as dark as it is light. Their presiding musical genius, Brian, died in June.

In 1951, the American author Peter Matthiessen moved to Paris. The scion of a wealthy Wasp family, he had studied at Yale and served in the navy, narrowly missing the second world war. He was then recruited to the CIA by James Jesus Angleton and sent to Paris, where he kept tabs on left-wing French intellectuals and expat Americans. As he later explained in a letter to a friend: When you’re 23, it seems pretty romantic to go to Paris with your beautiful young wife to serve as an intelligence agent and write the Great American Novel into the bargain. Weren’t you ever as young and dumb as that? While in Paris, Matthiessen helped to found the Paris Review with funding from CIA sources.

Edward FitzGerald had a good story about rowing across Lake Windermere at the end of May 1835 with his old friend Alfred Tennyson. As they rested on their oars and gazed into the clear, still water, Tennyson recited some lines from his work in progress, ‘Morte d’Arthur’, describing how the Lady of the Lake fashioned Excalibur out of sight: ‘Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps/ Upon the hidden bases of the hills.’ Then he gave himself a little pat on the back: ‘Not bad that, Fitz, is it?’ The lines are better than not bad, as they imagine an invisible process of creation by incorporating several fragments of earlier writing.

The discriminating Argentinian novelist Jorge Luis Borges once revealed his fondness for ‘hourglasses, maps, 18th-century typography, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Stevenson’ – a list that was quirky and eclectic, adjectives that neatly encapsulate Robert Louis Stevenson himself. The story has often been told – but it’s a good one – of how the wiry, velvet-jacketed Stevenson emerged from Edinburgh’s haute bourgeoisie to become a hugely successful writer, before ending his shortish, sickly life on the Pacific island of Samoa in 1894, a revered expatriate married to a wilful American woman a decade his senior.

C.P. Cavafy, who had a very high opinion of his own work, would no doubt be gratified to learn that he is now one of the most admired poets of the 20th century. This is all the more remarkable because during his lifetime (1863-1933) he did not allow a single volume of his poetry to be published, preferring to circulate privately printed sheets and pamphlets among his admirers. He was also disinclined to co-operate with those who wanted to translate the poems from their original Greek into other languages; but in English alone there have now been more than 30 different volumes of his complete or selected poems.

There is nobody who finds Gwyneth Paltrow, 52, more interesting than the woman who was a teenager in the 1990s. This was the last era of the true pin-up, the heart-throb, the movie star as icon, rather than the whiffy melange of brand-pusher, pound-shop activist and reality star that constitutes celebrity today. I was as Nineties as the next girl living in provincial Massachusetts and when I first saw Shakespeare in Love in 1998, Paltrow’s first and only Oscar-winning role as the late-16th-century actress-in-male-garb Viola de Lesseps, I’d never enjoyed anything as much in my life. And in 2025, Paltrow’s career’s Take Two fascinates the early middle-aged woman who finally gives in to the barrage of wellness marketing sent her way on Instagram.

When I lived in south London, my Algerian barber used to tell me that he came from Souk Ahras, ‘the home town of Augustine’. I found it strange to hear a forbidding doctor of the early church described as a local boy made good, but Catherine Conybeare shows me that I should not have done. Algerians have remembered what the Church has often overlooked: that Augustine’s thinking owes everything to his birth in 354 in what was then Roman North Africa. Although five million of his words survive, they come to us from the hands of medieval copyists who were more interested in setting out his doctrines than in recording his life. They cut up his sermons and letters, removing irrelevant or cryptic local allusions.

Colonel Tom Parker (1909-97) was the man who ripped Elvis Presley off and worked him to death. That’s the received wisdom about the person who managed the King from 1955 until his premature death, aged 42, in 1977. Peter Guralnick’s book, written with full access to Parker’s unpublished, witty, clever letters, now owned by the Elvis Archives, gives a more nuanced, sympathetic picture. The author is no biased sensationalist. His Elvis biography, Last Train to Memphis (1995), is one of the most serious and reliable. So, yes, Parker was a serial liar, not least when it came to his identity. Born Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk in humble circumstances in Holland, he fled, aged 16, to America and was then kicked out. He returned three years later, changing his name to Tom Parker.