Tag: biography

A House Full of Daughters (2016): Juliet Nicolson

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★★★★½

Granddaughter of Vita Sackville-West and daughter of Nigel Nicolson, Juliet Nicolson certainly has writing in her blood. After publishing several books about the social history of the early 20th century, she now turns her eye on her own remarkable family. Nicolson introduces us to seven generations of women, from the black-eyed Spanish dancer Pepita in the mid 19th century to Nicolson’s own infant granddaughter Imogen and tells their stories. Delivered with passion and compassion, this is a beautifully crafted tale of what it means to be a woman: as daughter, lover, wife and mother.

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A Life Discarded (2016): Alexander Masters

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★★★★

148 Diaries Found In A Skip

This was a little breath of fresh air in my recent reading. I’d read an article about the book some time ago, probably in the Guardian, which whetted my appetite (though in retrospect I wish I hadn’t seen it because it gave away all of the developments and surprises). Masters, who has written two other books based on extraordinary lives – neither of which I’ve yet read – here takes on another challenge: the intimacy and mundane fascination of writing a biography of someone whose name he doesn’t even know. All he has of this person, whom he christens ‘I’, are 148 of their diaries, stretching from the 1950s to the 1990s, which his friends Richard Grove and Dido Davies have discovered in a Cambridge skip. Tantalised by his subject’s anonymity, Masters sets out on a noble quest to give ‘I’ a voice at last and to find out what he can about this figure, whose very ordinary outward life hides an inner world full of passion, urgency, rage and thwarted ambition.

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The Parable Book (2013): Per Olov Enquist

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★★★

My one previous experience with Per Elov Enquist was via his novel The Visit of the Royal Physician, and it wasn’t an entirely comfortable introduction. I puzzled over what to make of the book’s jagged, disjointed style and was troubled by its detached emotional tone. At the time I wondered whether it was down to author, or translator, but now I can say, quite confidently, that it’s the author’s style. The Parable Book, translated by Deborah Bragan-Turner, has much the same cool, conceptual flavour. It is, however, a rather different beast from the Royal Physician: whereas that was a clear historical novel, this book weaves between genres. Is it novel, autobiography, family memoir, confessional history or philosophical exploration? It is even more disorientating than the Royal Physician, but it makes its mark: there’s something fierce and vivid and urgent at its heart.

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Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (2002): Claire Tomalin

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★★★★½

On 1 January 1660, a young clerk in the Exchequer in London began to keep a diary. He wasn’t the first diarist in history, far from it; but he was the first to find such potential in the form, and to make of his diary more than a dry chronicle of the times, or a self-examination of sins. This diary was different. From its very first page it showed an almost shocking candour as the young clerk recorded not only his work and social life, but also the most frank and intimate details about his marriage and his own turbulent sexual desires. This honesty sat alongside a lively intelligence which drank in all the events of the world around him. This clerk was Samuel Pepys and, from a historical point of view, he couldn’t have chosen a better moment to start such a detailed account of his life.

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No One Here Gets Out Alive (1980): Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman

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★★★

The biography of Jim Morrison

The Doors’s debut album was among the first CDs sent by my uncle in my correspondence course on classic rock. Being an impressionable young thing at the time (oh, it was all of three years ago), I was struck by the face on the cover: the brooding stare from under lowered lids and the tumbled mass of dark hair. And the music wasn’t half bad either, with its weird lyrics and dreamy rhythms: in fact, the album swiftly became one of my favourites. But I never paid much attention to the band themselves. When I went to Paris with my parents back in 2004, before I’d really heard of the Doors, we went to Père Lachaise; but, while Mum sought out Jim Morrison’s grave, I homed in on Oscar Wilde’s. And then, a few weeks ago, someone gave this biography to our village fete book stall. I decided it was time to learn a little more.

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The Far Traveler (2007): Nancy Marie Brown

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★★★½

Voyages of a Viking Woman

I realised that I was going to get along rather well with Nancy Marie Brown when I read the opening sentence of her first chapter: ‘The first time I saw a Viking ship in the water, I was struck with the desire to stow away on it‘. I was immediately charmed. Brown started out as a science writer, but she’s recently had the chance to return to her first love: Norse culture and mythology. Her writing is consequently an appealing blend of specialist and enthusiast.

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The King in the North (2005): Max Adams

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★★★★★

The Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria

Published at the end of August, this book came to my attention as a Kindle recommendation from Amazon. It was a bit of a leap into the dark. I hadn’t come across Max Adams before; I hadn’t heard of the publisher; and I had no idea who Oswald of Northumbria was. No one else on LibraryThing owned the book at the time. But the opening paragraph captivated me and I decided to take the plunge.

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Outsider: Always Almost: Never Quite (2011): Brian Sewell

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★★★★

Brian Sewell is now best known for being the art critic of the Evening Standard: ferociously knowledgeable, scrupulously precise and utterly intolerant of pretension. His exhibition reviews are the only ones I trust completely, and I should have read this first volume of his memoirs long before now; but I mistakenly assumed that it would be like the other art-world memoirs I’ve read. Those were dull, lifeless books, little more than a chance for the author to boast of his distinguished friends, settle scores with old enemies and rattle off a list of the famous paintings that he’s sold. I should have known better; and in any case, several people have recently urged me to read it – some struck by the elegance of the writing and others by Sewell’s brutal frankness.

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