Category Archives: Biography books

Was the fiddler framed? How Nero may have been a good guy after all

Posted on by

He was a demonic emperor who stabbed citizens at random and let Rome burn. Or was he? We go behind the scenes at a new show exploding myths about the ancient world’s favourite baddie

Nero comes with a lurid reputation. “The main thing we know about him is his infamy,” says Thorsten Opper, curator of the first British exhibition devoted to the Roman emperor. “The glutton, the profligate, the matricide, the megalomaniac.” Also, the pyromaniac: famously, Nero “fiddled while Rome burned”, or at least strummed his kithara to one of his own compositions, The Fall of Troy, while a fire, supposedly begun by him, destroyed three of Rome’s 14 districts and seriously damaged seven.

His afterlife on the page and screen is certainly arresting. Nero inspired some of the greatest Renaissance and baroque operas, notably Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea and Handel’s Agrippina, which chart the emperor’s adulterous love for Poppaea, who became his second wife. In the epic 1951 movie Quo Vadis, Peter Ustinov played Nero as entirely unhinged: a mincing, purple-swathed toddler in a man’s body. Christopher Biggins took him on in I, Claudius, the classic BBC adaptation of Robert Graves’s novel, and made him power-hungry, baby-faced and quite, quite mad.

Continue reading...

I’ve spent so much of my life dreaming of homes I cannot afford | Deborah Levy

Posted on by

In this extract from Real Estate, the final instalment of Deborah Levy’s ‘living autobiography’ series, she reflects on fantasy properties, empty nests and the relationship between property and freedom

I walked to Central Park. It had suddenly become warm and I was so jet lagged I thought I might faint. I found a place near the entrance to the park under a tree and collapsed on to the grass. Lying on my back, looking up at the big American sky between the leaves, I saw something hanging from the branches. It was a key. A key on a red ribbon that someone had hung on a branch and forgotten to take with them. I wondered if they had deliberately left it behind because they were never going to return to wherever the key belonged. Or perhaps they wanted to close a door on a chapter of their life and leaving the key behind was a gesture of this desire. There is always something secret and mysterious about keys. They are the instrument to enter and exit, open and close, lock and unlock various desirable and undesirable domains.

Continue reading...

And the brand played on: Bob Dylan at 80

Posted on by

With a slew of books to mark the songwriter’s birthday due, we look at the industry that has grown up around the man who forced academia to take pop seriously

  • Scroll down for Q&As with the authors of four new Dylan books

“It’s gonna take a hundred years before they understand me!” Bob Dylan once claimed, “they” being the cohorts of fans, critics and Dylanologists who have dogged his tracks ever since Robert Zimmerman, chippy teen of Hibbing, Minnesota, became Bob Dylan, world-famous singer, songwriter, and pop’s most enduring enigma.

“That’s exactly the quote James Joyce made about Ulysses,” points out Sean Latham, professor of English at the University of Tulsa and head of the institute for Bob Dylan Studies recently established there. “Joyce said, ‘I put so many puzzles and enigmas in Ulysses it will take the scholars 100 years to solve them’.”

Continue reading...

Thomas Bernhard was a ‘demon’, half-brother reveals in bestseller

Posted on by

Memoir by Peter Fabjan, an acclaimed hit in Bernhard’s native Austria, describes a tormented man who flitted between ‘affection and icy contempt’

In public, he could be gregarious. His charm was legendary. For the great Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard, life was a kind of production. But as his half-brother Peter Fabjan remembers him in his new book, A Life Alongside Thomas Bernhard: A Report, published in German in January, there was another side to Bernhard. “My life was a life with a phantom – indeed a demon – at my side,” he writes.

A Top 10 bestseller in Austria, and labelled a must-read by Germany’s Die Welt, Fabjan’s book marks what would have been Bernhard’s 90th year, were it not for his premature death in 1989 at the age of 58. It has been widely acclaimed by critics; behind Fabjan’s sentences, Marc Reichwein wrote in Welt am Sonntag, one feels “the wounds of a sibling’s entire life”.

Continue reading...

On my radar: Brett Anderson’s cultural highlights

Posted on by

The Suede frontman on his latest musical discoveries, the brilliance of Michael Clark and the enduring appeal of mudlarking by the Thames

Born in Sussex in 1967, Brett Anderson founded alternative rock band Suede in 1989 with then-girlfriend Justine Frischmann and childhood friend Mat Osman. Billed by Melody Maker as “the best new band in Britain”, Suede released five albums including their self-titled debut and Coming Up, before disbanding in 2003. Anderson went on to front the Tears and release four solo albums. In 2010 Suede reformed and released a further three albums, the latest of which is 2018’s The Blue Hour. Anderson will perform with Charles Hazlewood and Paraorchestra as part of the Gŵyl 2021 festival, 6-7 March.

Continue reading...

Francis Bacon: Revelations review – a landmark biography

Posted on by

From designing rugs in Paris to painting visions of human suffering … the origins of some of the 20th century’s most iconic artworks

Francis Bacon didn’t just create some of the most unforgettable images of the human figure in 20th-century painting. He created “Francis Bacon”, a legendary persona: big beast of the London art world, wild man and bon vivant, whose raw painterly gift – he is one of only three British artists to be given two retrospectives at the Tate Gallery in their lifetime – was matched by his appetite for champagne, gambling and rough sex with East End crooks. His death in 1992 triggered a run of tell-all biographies, including first-hand accounts by his friends. What further revelations, you wonder, can there be?

Most of the surprises in this landmark new biography of Bacon, the first for 25 years, concern his early life and career, which turn out to have been – at least outwardly – embarrassingly conventional. Born in Dublin in 1909 to Anglo-Irish gentry, Bacon grew up in a series of big country houses, with dashes to England during the Irish revolutionary period. He was severely asthmatic. One of his childhood memories was being shut into a dark cupboard by a housemaid for long periods; he said that the feeling of asphyxiation resembled an asthma attack. He also remembered the entire family hiding in their locked rooms at night, in dread of a visit from the IRA. Suffocation, confinement, a sense of terror – the foundations of Francis Bacon, man and artist, were being laid.

Continue reading...

Jackie Kay on Bessie Smith: ‘My libidinous, raunchy, fearless blueswoman’

Posted on by

As a black girl growing up in 1970s Glasgow, poet Jackie Kay developed a passion for Bessie Smith. In this extract from her new book, she remembers the wild spirit who helped her find her true self

I was adopted in 1961 and brought up in a suburban house in a suburban street in the north of Glasgow. A small, semi-detached Wimpey house. Outside our house is a cherry-blossom tree that is as old as me. It doesn’t seem the most likely place to be introduced to the blues, but then blues travel to wherever the blues lovers go. In my street and in the neighbouring streets to Brackenbrae Avenue, I never saw another black person. There was my brother and me. That was it. The butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker were all white. (Although I never actually met a candlestick-maker – has anyone?)

So the first time I saw Bessie Smith, it really was like finding a friend. I saw her before I heard her. My father – a Scottish communist who loved the blues – bought me my first double album. I was 12. The album was called Bessie Smith: Any Woman’s Blues and produced by CBS Records ( John Hammond and Chris Albertson; Albertson went on to write her biography). I remember taking the album off him and poring over it, examining it for every detail. Her image on the cover captivated me. She looked so familiar. She looked like somebody I already knew in my heart of hearts. I stared at the image of her, trying to recall who it was she reminded me of.

Continue reading...

Tom Templeton: ‘I suspect doctors have realised how therapeutic it can be to write books’

Posted on by

The former Observer writer and now GP talks about his new book, 34 Patients, and the challenges he has faced during the pandemic

How has life changed for you at the surgery during the pandemic?
The biggest change has been having to talk to patients on the phone rather than seeing them in person. We only see around three per day now in person.

Do you miss seeing people face to face?
Totally. It’s quite right that we do it the way we do but I love being with the patients and having that connection.

Continue reading...

Russian Roulette: The Life and Times of Graham Greene review – addicted to danger

Posted on by

A new biography, by Richard Greene, insists there was more to the author than ‘sex, books and depression’

When Gabriel García Márquez, in the presence of Fidel Castro, asked Graham Greene if it was true that he’d played Russian roulette with a loaded revolver, Greene assured him he had, several times. Castro, one of several world leaders with whom Greene had audiences over the years (Gorbachev, Ho Chi Minh and Pope Paul VI were others), calculated the odds and said he shouldn’t be alive. Greene thought the same. He’d expected to die young (“I’d rather die of a bullet in the head than a cancer of the prostate”) but survived to the age of 86.

The Russian roulette story has been disputed; Greene may have played it with blanks or empty chambers. But Richard Greene (no relation) takes it as the central premise of his biography: the novelist as risk-taker and adventurer, with a history of self-harm and an addiction to danger. An early trip to Liberia, to investigate modern slavery, set the tone. Greene knew there were risks – being shot at by soldiers, bitten by snakes or infected by lassa or yellow fever – but they only spurred him on. He was accompanied by his cousin Dorothy, who found him frightening: “If you are in a sticky place he will be so interested in noting your reactions that he will probably forget to rescue you.”

Continue reading...

Barack Obama on the moment he won the presidency – exclusive extract

Posted on by

In this excerpt from A Promised Land, the former president remembers the anxious run-up to the 2008 election. Scroll down to hear a clip of him reading from it

More than anything campaign-related, it was news out of Hawaii that tempered my mood in October’s waning days. My sister Maya called, saying the doctors didn’t think Toot [Obama’s grandmother] would last much longer, perhaps no more than a week. She was now confined to a rented hospital bed in the living room of her apartment, under the care of a hospice nurse and on palliative drugs. Although she had startled my sister with a sudden burst of lucidity the previous evening, asking for the latest campaign news along with a glass of wine and a cigarette, she was now slipping in and out of consciousness.

And so, 12 days before the election, I made a 36-hour trip to Honolulu to say goodbye. Maya was waiting for me when I arrived at Toot’s apartment; I saw that she had been sitting on the couch with a couple of shoeboxes of old photographs and letters. “I thought you might want to take some back with you,” she said. I picked up a few photos from the coffee table. My grandparents and my eight-year-old mother, laughing in a grassy field at Yosemite. Me at the age of four or five, riding on Gramps’s shoulders as waves splashed around us. The four of us with Maya, still a toddler, smiling in front of a Christmas tree.

Continue reading...

‘She made music jump into 3D’: Wendy Carlos, the reclusive synth genius

Posted on by

She went platinum by plugging Bach into 20th-century machines, and was soon working with Stanley Kubrick. But prejudice around her gender transition pushed Wendy Carlos out of sight

This summer, an 80-year-old synthesiser pioneer suddenly appeared online. She had been silent for 11 years, but now something had appeared that she just wouldn’t tolerate. “Please be aware there’s a purported ‘biography’ on me just released,” wrote Wendy Carlos on the homepage of her 16-bit-friendly website, a Siamese cat and a synthesiser behind her portrait. “No one ever interviewed me [for it], nor anyone I know,” she went on. “Aren’t there new, more interesting targets?”

Given that Carlos is arguably the most important living figure in the history of electronic music, it’s remarkable that Amanda Sewell’s Wendy Carlos: A Biography is the first book about her. This is the musician who pushed Robert Moog to perfect his first analogue synthesiser, from which pop, prog, electronica and film music flourished. Her smash-hit 1968 album Switched-On Bach made the Moog internationally famous and became the second classical album ever to go platinum in the US. Then came her extraordinary soundtracks for A Clockwork Orange, The Shining and Tron. She made an ambient album five years before Brian Eno did, and jumped from analogue machines to do leading work in digital synthesis, but worried that her status as one of the first visible transgender artists in the US would overshadow it.

Continue reading...

Zen and the art of torso maintenance: Matthew McConaughey’s guide to life

Posted on by

In a new book, Hollywood’s ‘easy-livin’ superstar bares all about his route to the top. Here are some choice nuggets of McConna-sense

The biggest question in the universe, writes Matthew McConaughey in his new autobiography (of sorts) is “WHOWHATWHEREWHENHOW?? – and that’s the truth. WHY? is even bigger.” With Greenlights, his love letter to livin, McConaughey attempts to answer these questions and others, such as why he never puts a “g” on the end of “living” – “because life’s a verb”.

Greenlights is not a memoir, though it tells true stories from his life in chronological order. Nor is it “an advice book”. It is “an approach book”, bringing together McConaughey’s insights from 35 years of writing journals, and more of collecting bumper stickers. These “philosophies can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted”. A few are shared here.

Continue reading...

Finding Freedom by Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand – Harry and Meghan and the making of a modern royal family

Posted on by

The scampish prince and his duchess definitely have a story to tell, but it is not the story in this book

Prince Harry – HRH as was – has long had to endure cruel snarks about, among other things, his paternity, yet in Finding Freedom, he confirms one thing beyond a doubt: he is 100% his mother’s son. Just as 1992’s Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words, by Andrew Morton, gave readers an intimate look at the royal family from the perspective of a disgruntled member of the firm, so this book repeats the trick with Diana’s younger son and his wife, Meghan Markle. What this semi-sequel lacks in novelty, it makes up for in cattiness (aimed largely – and this is the only real surprise of the book – at the woman born Kate Middleton, now known as Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge. We’ll return to that in a tick.)

Writers Carolyn Durand and Omid Scobie insist Harry and Meghan were not involved in the book. Given the deluge of personal minutiae – from Harry’s emoji habit to Meghan’s favourite hair highlight shades – as well as their litigiousness when it comes to undesired invasions of privacy (they are currently engaged in legal battles with the Mail on Sunday and an American paparazzo), this seems about as credible as Diana’s similar protestations of innocence, all of which Morton scotched about 10 seconds after she died. But whereas Diana chose a tabloid hack as her Boswell, who knew a good story when he saw it, Harry and Meghan opted for two royal journalists. This means the reader is subjected to the Sylvie Krin style of writing that is de rigeur in the genre (I could just about stomach Harry and his “famed ginger locks”, but details of his and Meghan’s glamping trip to Botswana, on which “their days were spent getting closer to nature and their evenings, closer to each other” made me briefly furious that the book hadn’t come with a health warning). Less forgivable than the predictable fluff is how the authors fluff the tale. Because Harry and Meghan definitely have a story to tell, but it is not the story in this book.

Continue reading...

The Caravan: Abdallah Azzam and the Rise of Global Jihad review – recent history at its finest

Posted on by

Thomas Hegghammer delivers a meticulously researched account of a charismatic Islamist

Abdallah Azzam is not exactly a household name – at least when compared with the far more notorious Osama bin Laden. But the militant Palestinian cleric who inspired and mobilised Arabs to come to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union in the 1980s is the most important jihadist figure before the birth of al-Qaida and the continuing consequences of the 9/11 attacks on the US.

Azzam is still revered by many who believe that the Islamic ummah (community/nation) matters more and has greater legitimacy than individual authoritarian Arab and Muslim states. Mosques, fighting units, training camps and websites have been named after him since he was assassinated in Pakistan in 1989. Fans maintain Twitter and Telegram accounts. Uncritical and heroic accounts of his achievements abound – in Arabic and English.

Continue reading...

Becoming review – tantalising tour of Michelle Obama’s life

Posted on by

This carefully authorised documentary offers glimpses of a dazzling presence on America’s political stage

Michelle Obama is a class act – one of the classiest – and her intelligence and poise now look like something from a lost golden age. The publication of her globally bestselling memoir Becoming in 2018 brought her dazzlingly into the public sphere on her own terms. It gave her an international A-list status to rival her husband’s and provided Democrats and non-Trumpians around the world with a manifesto of decency and dignity to cling on to.

Now we have this watchable, but carefully authorised, behind-the-scenes documentary for Netflix (from the Obamas’ company, Higher Ground Productions) about Obama’s American book tour (with a stopover at London’s O2 Arena). It shows her getting in and out of armoured sports utility vehicles, chatting easily and good-naturedly with her security detail, with colleagues and family members backstage, with beaming celebrity moderators onstage (starting with Oprah Winfrey) and with people getting their copies signed in bookstores who often dissolve in floods of tears just in coming face to face with her. (I was sorry, however, that we didn’t get to see again her amusing cameo in the TV comedy Parks and Recreation, which showed Amy Poehler’s earnest public official Leslie Knope reduced to a gibbering fangirl in her presence.)

Continue reading...

Woody Allen memoir published in US after protest stops first attempt

Posted on by

The controversial film director’s autobiography Apropos of Nothing had been dropped by its original publisher

Woody Allen’s memoir, dropped by its original publisher after widespread criticism, has found a new home.

The 400-page book, still called Apropos of Nothing, was released on Monday by Arcade Publishing.

Continue reading...

Stories of resistance efforts in Auschwitz | Letter

Posted on by
Harry Schneider on the Polish resistance leader and intelligence agent Witold Pilecki

While joining in the congratulations to Costa prize winner Jack Fairweather, I wonder whether the coverage of his book The Volunteer in your pages (for example in G2 on 30 January) might perhaps have led to a couple of misunderstandings, namely that a) Witold Pilecki was an unknown quantity previously and b) his was the only resistance operation in Auschwitz.

In fact, we have known all about Pilecki’s organisational skills since the 1970s thanks to the work of the late writer and historian Józef Garliński. Like Pilecki he had been a Polish officer arrested for underground activities, and he was a prisoner in Auschwitz and other German concentration camps. His bestselling book Fighting Auschwitz (1975) describes other forms of resistance at the camp as well. Whereas Pilecki’s organisation was based entirely on military contacts, there were also political networks, notably the one run by Stanisław Dubois of the Polish Socialist party. Pilecki recognised these other strands and tried to coordinate them. A later communist resistance effort inside the camp was rather ineffectual, since, under orders from Moscow, it was denied support from the communist partisans outside.

Continue reading...

New book claims Albert Camus was murdered by the KGB

Posted on by

Study expands on archive finds revealed in 2011, and suggests that the French state may have abetted the 1960 car crash that killed him

Sixty years after the French Nobel laureate Albert Camus died in a car crash at the age of 46, a new book is arguing that he was assassinated by KGB spies in retaliation for his anti-Soviet rhetoric.

Italian author Giovanni Catelli first aired his theory in 2011, writing in the newspaper Corriere della Sera that he had discovered remarks in the diary of the celebrated Czech poet and translator Jan Zábrana that suggested Camus’s death had not been an accident. Now Catelli has expanded on his research in a book titled The Death of Camus.

Continue reading...

Behrouz Boochani wins National Biography award – and accepts via WhatsApp from Manus

Posted on by

Judges call Kurdish Iranian writer and refugee’s memoir an ‘astonishing act of witness’

The Kurdish Iranian writer Behrouz Boochani has continued his sweep of the Australian literary prize landscape, winning the $25,000 National Biography award on Monday – yet another award the refugee was unable to accept in person, as he enters his sixth year of detention on Manus Island.

Boochani’s autobiography No Friend but the Mountains tells of his journey from Indonesia to Australia by boat, and his subsequent imprisonment on Manus Island by the Australian government, which continues to refuse him entry.

Continue reading...