Biography

Few rulers can have rejoiced in a less appropriate sobriquet than Augustus the Strong

Augustus the Strong (1670-1733), Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, is often labelled one of the worst monarchs in European history. His reign is billed by Tim Blanning’s publishers as ‘a study in failed statecraft, showing how a ruler can shape history as much by incompetence as brilliance’. Yet this thorough and often hilarious study of Augustus’s life and times reveals these harsh headline words to be exaggerated. Indeed the man comes across as quite a good egg, as much sinned against as sinning. With disarming immodesty, Augustus described himself as: A lively fellow, carefree, showing from a young age that he was blessed with a strong body, a

Damian Thompson

Man of mystery and friend of the Cambridge spies

In April 1967 Tony Scotland, a cub reporter for Australia’s ABC television news, drove with a cameraman from Hobart to a sheep station in Fingal to interview Lord Talbot de Malahide, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat who had edited a book about Tasmanian flora. This was a delicate assignment. Lord Talbot was a retired British ambassador to Laos who divided his time between his family’s Tasmanian property and one of Ireland’s grandest castles. He was fearsomely well-connected, peppery and ‘not good with people’. ABC had been trying for years to interview him, and he only grudgingly allowed in the cameras to publicise the book. Scotland, a 22-year-old English public schoolboy, wondered why

The sad story of the short-lived Small Faces

One Sunday in October 1967, about 16 per cent of the British population settled down at 8.15 p.m. to watch the Morecambe & Wise Show on ITV. This was mainstream family entertainment aimed at all age groups, but there was also a place each week for teen-friendly acts from the pop charts. That evening it was the turn of four sharply dressed East End mods, who managed to inject some real heart and soul into their band’s performance. ‘They look very nice, don’t they?’ said Ernie, to which Eric replied: ‘They look extremely nice, except for one thing. Their faces are too small, I feel. Much too small.’ Mild leg-pulling

From ugly duckling into swan – the remarkable transformation of Pamela Digby

The tramp of lovers marching through our heroine’s bedroom in the first half of Sonia Purnell’s Kingmaker almost deafens the reader. But then not for nothing did Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman become known as the alpha courtesan of the 20th century. What is perhaps not so well covered is her decade-long influence on American politics before becoming the United States Ambassador to France under (no, not literally) Bill Clinton. The Hon Pamela Digby was born on 20 March 1920 and brought up quietly in Dorset, riding, hunting and meeting only those her parents (her father was the 11th Baron Digby) considered above the social plimsoll line. Early on she

The mystique of Henry V remains as powerful as ever

A rare portrait of King Henry V of England painted in the early 16th century shows him in profile. This unusual angle may have served two purposes. One was as a rather outdated emulation of Italian profile portraiture, with its blunt references to the might of imperial Rome; the other was to hide a disfiguring scar from a dangerous wound suffered at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403. Henry was only 16 at the time of the battle, and it was a brutal way to earn his spurs. An arrow had penetrated his cheek six inches and lodged at the back of his skull. He was lucky to have survived

The medieval English matriarch was a force to be reckoned with

In 1448, Margaret Paston, a wife and mother in her twenties, wrote to her husband John urgently requesting more weapons: she needed crossbows, poleaxes, windlasses and jacks. In John’s absence, a local lord was trying to take over Gresham, their property in Norfolk, and was mounting a violent siege of the manor house. Margaret was leading the defence. She was multi-tasking, however. In the same letter she also asks John to send some almonds and sugar, as well as woollen cloth for gowns for their young sons and broadcloth for a hood for herself. The missive survives as part of the Paston letters, the largest extant set of medieval correspondence

The greatest British pop singer who never made a hit single

This is a magnificent book, regardless of whether the reader knows who it is about. I state this bluntly at the outset because I am keenly aware that many more people are ignorant of Lawrence’s career and achievements in the field of popular music than will be familiar with them; and that I will need to use up a significant number of words attempting to explain a figure who has repeatedly proven inexplicable to the public at large. So here goes… Has the indefatigably eccentric Lawrence led a charmed life or a cursed one? Lawrence Hayward may be the greatest British pop star never to have enjoyed a hit single.

Six politicians who shaped modern Britain

‘All political careers end in failure,’ said Enoch Powell. Maybe. But just occasionally our imperfect political system throws up someone whose impact on our way of life, for good or ill, outlives them. In a series of elegant essays, Vernon Bogdanor, professor of government at King’s College London, examines the careers of six politicians – three from left of centre, three from the right – who, in his view, changed the political weather of modern Britain. Only one, Nigel Farage, is still alive.  First up is Aneurin Bevan, the left-wing firebrand who, in the teeth of fierce opposition from the mighty, vested-interested British Medical Association, presided over the creation of

How weird was Oliver Cromwell?

One of the most notorious episodes in the siege of Drogheda, when more than 3,000 Irish people were killed by an English army headed by Oliver Cromwell, came when Cromwell and his troops chased a renegade band of the enemy up into the steeple of St Peter’s church. When the fleeing detachment of soldiers refused to surrender, Cromwell ordered that the steeple be burned. We know that this is true because, in addition to the corroborating evidence, Cromwell wrote a 1,500-word letter about the events back to the House of Commons on 17 September 1649, exulting that he had even heard one of the trapped men screaming: ‘God damn me,

Sam Leith

Can W.H. Auden be called a war poet?

Nicholas Jenkins takes, as a point to navigate by in this rich and ingenious study of the early Auden, a remark by the poet’s friend Hannah Arendt. Auden, she said, had ‘the necessary secretiveness of the great poet’. You can’t always trust what Auden, in his prose and in his later interviews, claimed to have been getting at in the poems. And in Jenkins’s account, you can’t even trust what the poems think they’re getting at. Jenkins seeks to put Auden back in his own time, and embed the verse in his life. Auden said in public, for instance, that the first world war had little effect on him; and

Introducing Tchaikovsky the merry scamp

Some years ago, following a Christmas performance of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, I sat in one of the dives near the theatre with a member of the corps de ballet, the gay son of close friends. The audience had been populated largely by children and teenagers, most of whom were either smitten by the intrepid, empathetic Clara or wanted to be her. Yet the mood perceptibly shifted when, at the end of Act I, the life-sized nutcracker doll transformed into a most handsome prince, all grace and gluts. ‘Do you think in that moment,’ I asked my dancer friend, ‘that a smattering of adolescent boys, out on a family treat, notice their

The enduring charisma of Brazil’s working-class president

A better title for this book might have been ‘Lula: A Drama’. In the first of two long- anticipated volumes, Fernando Morais has delivered an unconventional but riveting account of the key moments of tumult in the career of Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-11; 2023-present). A veteran journalist, Morais is clinical in his detail of the underground union gatherings, abject poverty and family tragedy which formed Lula. He brings São Paulo’s working-class culture to life throughout, with popular car brands, pop songs and sessions of cachaça and gin rummy ever present. Lula’s upbringing was marred by hardship. Born in poverty in 1945, with a brutal, bigamist father,

Bogart and Bacall’s first film together might as well have been called Carry On Flirting

You must remember this… Harry Morgan is leaning on the bar wondering how the femme fatale and her wounded freedom fighter husband are doing. Then Slim walks in, wearing two wisps of black satin linked by a hoop around her navel. Harry tells her it’s time he checked on his patient. ‘Give her my love,’ says Slim. ‘I’d give her my own,’ says Harry, ‘if she were wearing that.’ And in real life, as the tabloids would say, he did. We are talking of To Have and Have Not (1944), in which Harry is Humphrey Bogart and Slim is Lauren Bacall. The director, Howard Hawks, said the movie was just

A marriage of radical minds: the creative partnership of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson

It is hard to imagine any Victorian man living a fuller life in a flimsier body than Robert Louis Stevenson – and he certainly wouldn’t have managed it without the support of his partner and wife of several decades, Fanny Van de Grift. Born in Edinburgh on 13 November 1850, Louis suffered from countless childhood illnesses that limited his activity to reading books, writing stories and staging ‘pasteboard theatre’ productions with his nanny, or else travelling to health spas in Marseille, Genoa and Naples. He strongly resisted his father’s efforts to enlist him in his own career as a lighthouse designer, and at Edinburgh University the only thing he excelled

The crusading journalist who lectured on Shelley to coal miners

‘The politics of Paul Foot are an extraordinary mixture of first-class reporting, primitive Marxism, family wit and fantasy.’ This judgment is taken from a review of Foot’s first book, The Politics of Harold Wilson (1968). The reviewer was well placed to assess it, and, according to this biography, he ‘tore the book apart’. As well as being an MP, he was Paul’s uncle, Michael Foot. Born in 1937, Paul Foot came from a political family. His grandfather, Isaac, and his eldest uncle, Dingle, were both Liberal MPs; his father, Hugh, was a distinguished diplomat who, as Lord Caradon, would become a foreign office minister; and his uncle Michael became a

Malice and intrigue in the shadow of Tom Tower

‘The House’ in the title of Richard Davenport-Hines’s engaging new book is Christ Church, by any reckoning the grandest of Oxford’s colleges. The place has always been, he notes, akin ‘to an autonomous duchy within a larger federated kingdom’, and thus ‘a separate realm of memory’. Notoriously, its teachers and researchers are referred to not (in the usual Oxford way) as Fellows but as Students. That fact may be thought as good an illustration of its eccentricity as of its charm. This book isn’t a history of the House, as such, but a more concentrated series of biographical essays about ‘a select and self-regulated group of men who taught modern

‘I am haunted by waters’: Norman Maclean and his lyrical ‘little blue book’

Although in his later years Norman Maclean was renowned for his nuanced and often lyrical autobiographical novella A River Runs Through It (subsequently filmed by Robert Redford, and known in angling circles – with mixed feelings – simply as ‘The Movie’), by all accounts he could be forbidding and ornery in person. He informed one Hollywood shyster: ‘When we had bastards like you out west we shot them for coyote bait.’ The novelist Pete Dexter once described him as ‘an old man who obviously takes no prisoners, looking at you as if you’d just invented rock’n’ roll’ – and that was only from a photograph. There are indeed some moody

Tall tales of the Golden East: the fabulous fabrications of two 20th-century con artists

Have literary deceit and spiritual self-invention ever been this entertaining? The question arises on almost every page of this galloping exposé of two men who were exceedingly relaxed about not telling the truth throughout their professional lives. They would have called it ‘storytelling’. Those who questioned the reliability of their often outlandish claims were dismissed as academic nonentities. One minute Ikbal’s journey across the Middle East was 15,000 miles, the next it was 25,000 miles Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah was the great-grandson of Jan Fishan Khan, a 19th-century Arab nobleman who had supported the British in Afghanistan and been rewarded with an Indian title, palace and pension. Ikbal failed to

Why Joni Mitchell sounded different from the start

What makes Joni Mitchell’s music special? The lyrics alone put her on 20th-century music’s Mount Rushmore, alongside her cultural mirror Bob Dylan and her brief lover Leonard Cohen. But for me it’s her phrasing, her tunings and her sense of time. Decades on, her music remains endlessly surprising. Think a line is going in a certain direction? Think again, as Mitchell bends it away; or shifts key; or arcs her voice into its celestial sphere, only to suddenly plummet, like a plane in turbulence. And yet the swerves feel somehow right, inevitable.  Enlisting the help of jazz greats from Wayne Shorter to Herbie Hancock, Mitchell invented her own musical grammar:

The irrepressible musical gift of Huddie Ledbetter

Huddie Ledbetter, better known by the prison moniker Lead Belly, was a musical genius born in the southern United States just as Jim Crow laws were starting to bite. He fell foul of an unapologetically racist legal system and ended up serving on a chain gang in 1915, later doing time in state penitentiaries in Texas (1918-25), Louisiana (1930-34) and at Rikers Island in New York (1939). Sheila Curran Bernard takes as her focus the years 1933 to 1935 when, after years of imprisonment, Ledbetter took an academic, John Lomax, to be his manager and organise his entrance into the larger musical world of northern America. She reveals for the