biography
Helen Tyson
Writing in her diary just over 100 years ago on 19th June 1923, Virginia Woolf wrote: “In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense”.Set on a hot day in London in the middle of June in 1923, Mrs Dalloway might at first appear to be about very little – a middle-aged woman and survivor of the 1918 influenza pandemic, Clarissa Dalloway, wife to a conservative MP, is going to give a party. She buys some flowers; she repairs her green silk dress; she has a Read more ...
Claudia Bull
How do you tell the story of a person’s mind? In the preface to Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark, published this year by Bloomsbury, Frances Wilson points out that biography was one of her subject’s own fixations.Spark’s first full-length book, Child of Light, reinterpreted the life of Mary Shelley by means of a novel two-part structure: half “Recollection” and half criticism. She went on to write several literary biographies and her fiction is populated by chroniclers, libellers, and legacy-obsessed pensioners.In 1992, hoping to counter the “strange and erroneous” accounts of her Read more ...
John Carvill
Do we need any more Beatles books? The answer is: that’s the wrong question. What we need is more Beatles books that are worth reading. As the musician and music historian Bob Stanley pointed out, in his 2007 review of Jonathan Gould’s Can’t Buy Me Love, probably the best biography of The Beatles to date, “the subject is pretty much inexhaustible if the writer is good enough.”Gould is more than good enough, and he spent nearly two decades writing his book; whereas Ian Leslie has worked his up from a Covid-era blog post paean to Paul McCartney that went, as they say, viral. Leslie attests to Read more ...
John Carvill
Patrick McGilligan’s biography of Woody Allen weighs in at an eye-popping 800 pages, yet he waits only for the fourth paragraph of his introduction before mentioning the toxic elephant in the room: i.e. the sad fact that, despite never having been charged with – let alone convicted of – any crime, Allen in 2025 is, to all intents and purposes, cancelled.So let’s deal with that first. The reason for Allen having suffered what McGilligan calls “the living death of being declared an unperson” has transmogrified over the years. Initially, he was weighed in the balance of public opinion and found Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Myra Hess was one of the most important figures in British cultural life in the mid-20th century: the pre-eminent pianist of her generation and accorded “national treasure” status as a result of the wartime lunchtime concert series at London’s National Gallery, which she singlehandedly masterminded through 1,698 concerts between 1939 and 1946.This new biography, the first for nearly 50 years, is meticulously researched and richly illustrated: Jessica Duchen brings to her task not just the biographer’s curious eye but a music critic’s ear and discernment.Hess had to battle prejudices Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Donald Rodney’s most moving work is a photograph titled In the House of My Father, 1997 (main picture). Nestling in the palm of his hand is a fragile dwelling whose flimsy walls are held together by pins. This tiny model is made from pieces of the artist’s skin removed during one of the many operations he underwent during his short life; sadly he died the following year, aged only 37.His body was crumbling under the onslaught of sickle cell anaemia, a disease that almost exclusively affects people of African descent and for which there is no known cure. In one of his notebooks, beside a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As Bono once commented about Luciano Pavarotti, “the opera follows him off stage”. Legendary soprano Maria Callas would have known exactly what he meant, and she herself said “an opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down.”Pablo Larraín’s Maria completes his trilogy of films about famous and charismatic women at critical moments in their lives, the others being Jackie Kennedy (Jackie, 2016) and Princess Diana (Spencer, 2021). It picks up the daunting challenge of evoking the life but above all the myth of La Callas, one of a handful of opera legends who Read more ...
theartsdesk
Billie Holiday sings again, Olivia Laing tends to her garden, and Biran Klaas takes a chance: our reviewers discuss their favourite reads of 2024.Joe Boyd’s And the Roots of Rhythm Remain (Faber & Faber, £30) delivers handsomely on the promise of its subtitle: a journey through global music. The veteran producer and promoter has been soaking up the varied music of many cultures since long before that problematic term “world music” was invented. I was hooked on his border-hopping conspectus of much of the most interesting music of the last century from the opening long chapter on South Read more ...
John Carvill
What is it about Humphrey Bogart? Why does he still spark interest, still feel relevant, so many decades after his death? It’s a complex question and may be impossible to satisfactorily answer, but there’s no doubt that Bogart being one half of Hollywood’s most famous love story has had something to do with it.There have been numerous Bogart biographies, and even the idea of telling the story through the lens of the Bogie and Bacall romance has been done at least twice previously. Well, there is nothing new under the Klieg lights; what’s important is not the tale but how it’s told. William J Read more ...
How To Survive Your Mother, King's Head Theatre review - mummy issues drive autobiographical dramedy
Gary Naylor
It is unsurprising to learn in the post-show Q&A that each audience receives Jonathan Maitland’s new play based on his 2006 memoir differently. My house laughed a lot (me especially) but some see the tragic overwhelming the comic, and the laughs dry up. When it comes to humour, as is the case with mothers, it’s each to their own.It’s an unusual production right from the off when the playwright, who is also a main character, is also acting himself too – but not entirely, as there’s a pre-teen and post-teen version of him too, played by different actors. Got all that? When you add his Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The Bloomsbury group’s habit of non-binary bed-hopping has frequently attracted more attention than the artworks they produced. But in their Vanessa Bell retrospective, the MK Gallery has steered blissfully clear of salacious tittle tattle. Thankfully, this allows one to focus on Bell’s paintings and designs rather than her complicated domestic life.The first picture you encounter was painted during a family holiday in Cornwall and dates back to 1900, the year before Bell became a student at the Royal Academy. Two thatched cottages cling to a steep slope by the sea. Punctuated only by the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Robert Crumb puts America’s racist, misogynist Id on paper with self-implicating obsession. Terry Zwigoff’s 1995 documentary on the underground cartoonist and his even further out family is reissued as the channels for such purging, pungent art have contracted further, zealously policed by Left and Right dreams of moral perfection.Filmed over eight years, Zwigoff shows the Philadelphia housing project where the Crumb family lived an outwardly respectable, privately maniacal post-war life, and Robert sketching the late 20th century streets of San Francisco, site of his early triumph with Read more ...