Christopher Sandford

Yes, Sir Anthony Hopkins did have a life before The Silence of the Lambs. And after it, too. But most casual moviegoers would be hard pressed to add too many other entries to his filmography. Like his most famous screen creation, the cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter, Hopkins has always been something of a study in contrasts. As an actor, he sits in the middle of the Venn diagram where the mainstream and the fringe overlap, seemingly as happy to mug his way through the Transformers franchise as to direct and star in a project like 1996’s August, a drily worthy adaptation of Uncle Vanya that barely registered on the sordidly commercial level.

A narrative biography by a member of its subject’s family is, if not unique, something of a novelty. Here, Christopher Shaw Myers writes the story, while his uncle Robert Shaw’s life (1927-78) provides the book’s framework. Shaw Myers has previously written the as-yet-unfilmed screenplay Jaws & Mrs. Shaw and revisits some of the same material here. In both cases, a pivotal moment comes when Robert Shaw’s mother visits the set where Jaws is being shot in 1974 off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, and thus happens to be present when her son polishes off the monologue about the shark attack on survivors of the USS Indianapolis that anticipates the gory finale of the film.

Must we approve of an author’s private life in order to enjoy his or her books? Possibly not, to judge by the continuing popularity of writers as diverse as Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, P.L. Travers, Roald Dahl and Norman Mailer, to name but a few of those whose domestic affairs have fallen short of the temperate or monogamous ideal. And what of the sage of Cornish, J.D. Salinger, most of whose interactions during his long years of New Hampshire exile involved hanging around with local teenagers? In 1972, a fresh-faced journalism student named Joyce Maynard left college and went to live with the 53-year-old author of The Catcher in the Rye at his invitation. After eight months, she was unceremoniously dumped.

What more can be said of the American conservative commentator, novelist, musician, sailor, talk-show host and tireless public intellectual William F. Buckley Jr. (1925-2008), that he or his previous biographers haven’t already said or written? After all, this is an individual who in 1983 wrote a 90,000-word book, called Overdrive, covering the events of a single week of his life. Plenty more, it turns out, as Sam Tanenhaus proves in his thousand-page biography Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America. Buckley was blessed with a voice that sounded like he let it marinate in a cask of port between appearances Buckley was 58 when he wrote Overdrive, and kept to a schedule that would have taxed the energy of a man half his age.

In 2024, a Swiss company called FinalSpark claimed to have built the world’s first computer processor fired by human brain cells. To do this, the company evidently took small samples of living brain tissue, and — so the press release says — “connected them to specialized electrodes to perform computer processing and digital analog conversions to transform neural activity into digital information.” Frankenstein undertones aside, the whole FinalSpark initiative raises the issue of how far a computer can be humanized, made not only to respond with factual accuracy but with something approaching emotional intelligence.

In February 1974, the British prime minister Edward Heath, then facing one of his country’s cyclical economic crises, called a snap general election. The result was close; Heath’s Conservative Party won the popular vote but secured fewer parliamentary seats than the Labour opposition. After power-sharing discussions broke down, Heath resigned from office. A fifty-seven-year-old bachelor without a London home of his own, he lodged for the next several months at a small Westminster flat owned by his political secretary Timothy Kitson. The man who had served as his nation’s head of government for the previous four years was left with a typist, a single daytime detective and a part-time driver at his disposal.

The title of this book may offer a clue to its prevailing tone. There’s a certain amount of showbiz gossip involved, but it is essentially a protracted rumination of the “What’s it all about, Alfie?” variety, with plenty of unflinching discourse on matters such as spirituality, depression, addiction and the precariousness of the human condition. “I wondered how many times a heart can break,” the authors write near the end of their tale of untold material privilege and wrenching emotional grief. All too often, is the inescapable answer. The book is freighted with a certain amount of woe from the start, because its principal author, Elvis Presley’s only child, herself tragically died in January 2023, aged fifty-four, due to weight-loss surgery complications.

An unusual disclaimer greets the reader on the title page of this memoir of an actor chiefly known for starring as the lovable goofball Cosmo Kramer on the hit TV sitcom Seinfeld. “Neither the US Army nor any other component of the Department of Defense has approved, endorsed, or authorized this book,” it notes. But in the event the Pentagon probably needn’t have worried. Drafted into the army in 1970, the actor in question, Michael Richards, seems to have avoided any Sergeant Bilko-like shenanigans and instead separated from the service with a heightened appreciation for the punctuality, discipline and meticulous preparation that characterized his later career.

The Watergate scandal already commands a wide bookshelf. In the fifty years since Richard Nixon fell on his sword, we’ve had the big-ticket books by the tag-team of Woodward and Bernstein, and others, by contrast, seeking to exonerate Nixon and pin the whole thing on his adversaries; tales about secret sources and White House interns and plucky whistleblowers like the oleaginous John Dean and that human hand grenade Martha Mitchell; not to mention self-serving memoirs from all the principals, some now on their second or third helping at the table; or the ones saying it was all a conspiracy involving an unholy alliance of the FBI, MI6 and KGB, with the little green men from Mars thrown in.