Sam Leith Sam Leith

Angela Carter biography wins award

I had the privilege – alongside the wise and learned Caroline Moorehead and Ian Kelly – of helping judge this year’s Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, which was last night awarded to Edmund Gordon for his superb The Invention of Angela Carter. Since we had a truly belting shortlist for this prize, I thought it might be worth reposting the remarks I made in running over the shortlist, and linking, where possible, to the Spectator’s coverage of the books in question. (It’s to my shame that we didn’t review Gareth Russell. As I mention, popular Tudor history books come thick and fast and sometimes the good ones slip through.)

This was an exceptional shortlist, in which every book showed not only thorough knowledge of its subject but deep and sympathetic understanding. And from the Tudor court, to the battlefields of the first world war, from a busy obs/gynae ward on the NHS to the august halls of the National Gallery, from a book-lined study to a Japanese love-hotel, we were thoroughly immersed in the worlds these books inhabit.

In the end, though, we had to pick a first among equals. And for its elegant writing, fastidious research and becomingly modest yet entirely authoritative portrait of its fascinating subject and her work, we chose Edmund Gordon’s The Invention Of Angela Carter as our winner.

David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet by Thomas Dilworth

Thomas Dilworth’s Life of David Jones brings extraordinary resources of scholarship and sympathy to bear on a vexingly difficult subject – and makes a vital case for his place in the front rank of 20th-century artists. As Dilworth’s subtitle suggests, David Jones was a man of many sides – and it’s to his deep credit that he reads Jones’s poetry as sensitively and suggestively as he does his drawings, paintings and engravings, and links them both persuasively to the growth of Jones’s unique mythic imagination, and to his sometimes painful private life.

The

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