Biography

Matthew, the author’s son, and the subject of this memoir, had Downs Syndrome, but I should state at once that the book is much more than a guide for parents, or carers, of such children. It stands on its own as a work of literature and should win the PEN/Ackerley prize for memoir and autobiography. The author, in her poised, sometimes old-fashioned prose, beguiles the reader. As a little girl, she befriended a neighbour’s child whom she first saw through the hedge: Large and silent … she wore a bow in her hair and usually carried a doll in her arms. Her smile melted my heart, and though I could not understand the reason for this, it sometimes brought tears to my eyes.

Memoirs? No one writes them any more. If you wish to distinguish yourself from the sweaty masses, you are far better off publishing a diary, or notebook, call it what you will (Frederic Raphael naturally calls it a cahier). To publish one, of course, you need to have written one, ideally some years ago, full of gossip and spleen and brutal judgments on your contemporaries, some of whom are now dead, and the rest of whom soon will be when they read it. It may not have the form or the contrivance of a memoir — it may, in truth, ramble a bit — but we will forgive this because, its writer will assure us, it was never written for publication.

The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography, by Robert Crawford Robert Burns: A Biography, by Patrick Scott Hogg How to account for the phenomenon of Robert Burns? Not the man or his poetry, but the national icon, a Caledonian amalgam of Alexander Pushkin and Bob Marley? The process of idolisation began with the instant acclaim that greeted the publication of Burns’ first collection, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, in 1786. That it continues today in this the 250th anniversary of his birth is demonstrated by the publication of two new biographies. But to explain why is harder than it might seem. Logically Scotland and Burns should have been incompatible.

Byron in Love, by Edna O’Brien ‘We would entreat him to believe that a certain portion of liveliness, somewhat of fancy, is necessary to constitute a poem,’ wrote Henry Brougham in the Edinburgh Review, when the young Byron was unwise enough to expose his first, dismal book of juvenilia to the gaze of ‘Citizen Mob’, ‘and that a poem in the present day, to be read, must contain at least one thought, either in a little degree different from the ideas of former writers or differently expressed’. It is as well for a lot of us that there seem to be different standards for biographers ,because there can be even less to be said for a new book about Byron than there is for most literary retreads.

Reborn: Susan Sontag, Early Diaries, 1947-1964, edited by David Rieff Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir, by David Rieff Susan Sontag, who died in 2004, was one of the late- 20th century’s famous public intellectuals. A stupendously well-read novelist, essayist and critic, strikingly good looking with her white badger-lock, she was engagé, pronouncing on many subjects, from Chinese dissidents to the meaning of disease. She appeared unassailably self-confident, so it is sad, but a bit of a relief, to learn from this first volume of her journal, begun when she was 14, that Sontag was precocious but also deeply depressed. I can’t recall reading a more melancholy book.

Arthur Miller, 1915-1962, by Christopher Bigsby Arthur Miller was born in 1915 in Jewish Harlem, the son of immigrants from the shtetl, enjoying comfortable family wealth until his father’s business collapsed. The key events in forming his political outlook were the Depression, the Spanish Civil War, the Cold War — and the slow-to-dawn truth about Stalinism. The ever-present corollary is ‘New York Jew’. At the outset of a biography encompassing the man and his work, Christopher Bigsby points up Miller’s recurring debt to the classical Greek theatre, ‘where a society could engage with its myths, its animating principles.’ Tall and strong, Miller remarkably was never conscripted during the second world war.

‘Blinker’ Hall, Spymaster, by David Ramsay The first world war admiral, ‘Blinker’ Hall — so-called for the obvious reason — is less widely known than Jellicoe, Beatty & Co., but his contribution to victory and history was arguably greater. He was the Director of Naval Intelligence (DNI) who ensured the success of Room 40, the 1914 equivalent of Bletchley Park in 1939. Less famous than its successor, partly because radio was less used then, its ability to decrypt German naval and diplomatic ciphers was no less significant. Not the least of its achievements, enhanced by Hall’s outstanding political skill, was the decoding of the Zimmerman telegram, which effectively brought America into the war.

The Pursuit of Laughter: Essays, Articles and Reviews, by Diana Mitford, edited by Deborah Devonshire Nancy was the only one of the six Mitford sisters who, throughout her life, bitterly complained of the fact that she had not been sent to school. Her younger sister, Diana, on the other hand, dreaded the very thought of school, and when they were children it was one of Nancy’s favourite teases to pretend she had overheard their parents planning to pack Diana off. ‘I was talking about you to Muv and Farve,’ Nancy would begin, a wicked gleam in her eye. ‘We were saying how good it would be for you to go away to school.