Biography

Edward Lear liked to tell the story of how he was once sitting in a railway carriage with two women who were reading aloud to children from his Book of Nonsense. When a male passenger confidently asserted that ‘There is no such person as Edward Lear’, the writer was obliged to prove his own existence as ‘the painter & author’ (in that order) by showing the passengers his name on his hat, handkerchief and visiting card. In an extraordinary drawing of this event, Lear depicted himself and the two women realistically, but the doubting man is a cartoonish figure straight out of one of his limericks. Lear’s two worlds of

It’s awful, but the surname Rausing (once synonymous only with the Tetrapak fortune) now summons up a terrible stench in the imagination. It’s that of Eva Rausing’s decomposed body, wrapped in a tarpaulin on the marital double bed in Belgravia, buried under a mattress, several flat-screen televisions and a heap of blankets and duvets. When it was discovered by police forcing open the duct-taped bedroom door in July 2012 — more than two months after her husband Hans had left it there, unable to face up to his wife’s death from cocaine-induced heart failure — the only way Eva could be identified was by a fingerprint and the number on

On the evening of 28 October 1908, two unremarkable middle-class women wearing heavy overcoats gained admission to the Ladies’ Gallery, high above the chamber in the House of Commons. Suffragettes had previously hit the headlines by chaining themselves to the railings at 10 Downing Street and, emboldened by this success, the leaders of the women’s movement planned an even more outrageous demonstration. The Ladies’ Gallery was surrounded by a metal grille, and this had huge significance for the suffragettes, as it symbolised their exclusion from the patriarchal political system. The plot was for two of them to chain themselves to the hated grille. One of the women chosen for the

The Enigma of Kidson is a quintessentially Etonian book: narcissistic, complacent, a bit silly and ultimately beguiling. It is the story of Michael George MacDonald Kidson (MGMK, as he was known), who taught history at Eton from 1965 to 1994 and was an influential tutor to hundreds of boys, often the wayward and the damaged. Jamie Blackett, who was taught by him there, has collected Kidsoniana from former pupils, colleagues, friends and acquaintances. What emerges is a portrait of a colourful maverick who bullied and consoled generations of schoolboys into success and happiness. Blackett conjures up a cheerful world where robust and affectionate Springers (Kidson’s Dougal, Boody, Bertie, Charlie, Jed

Before Brooklyn exceeded it in cool, Manhattanites spoke dismissively of BNTs. These were the Bridge ‘n’ Tunnel folk, the out-of-towners who needed civil engineering to help them reach social nirvana. The ambitious critic Norman Podhoretz, a master of self-invention, was one such. His notorious Making It (1967) begins: ‘One of the longest journeys in the world is… from Brooklyn to Manhattan.’ But since 1883 the journey over the East River has only been 5,989 feet, although physical distance was not the measure that pained Podhoretz. That’s the total length of Washington Roebling’s Brooklyn Bridge, the first connection between the outer boroughs and the elite ‘New York’. It was, and remains,

Forgotten? Though I can rarely attend their dinners (in Birmingham), I am a proud member of the Buckland Club (motto: Semper in ventrem aliquid novi). Dedicated to the memory and gastronomic exploits of Francis Trevelyan (Frank) Buckland (1826–1880), the Oxford-born surgeon, natural historian and popular writer who aspired to eat a member of every living animal species, the Club’s repasts are unfailingly interesting, if seldom so ambitious. Frank’s penchant for zoöphagy came from his father, William (1784–1856), a Canon and Dean of Christ Church, where he served up delicacies such as mice on toast, pickled horse tongue, puppies, hedgehog, crocodile and bear. The travel writer Augustus Hare is the source

A film critic friend, astonished that I had never heard of Shirley Jackson, told me to go and read her immediately. That was ten years ago and she has since become one of a handful of talismanic writers I reach for when craving literary succour. An undisputed master of the gothic and the uncanny— We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Hangsaman are both masterclasses in the unearthly and the opaque — she plumbs domestic and familial horror in a way which manages to be both universal and chillingly particular. She is also, in Britain anyway, still ridiculously underrated, even unknown. This new biography by the New Yorker critic

The ten pallbearers at Thomas Hardy’s funeral in Westminster Abbey on 16 January 1928 included Kipling, Barrie, Housman, Gosse, Galsworthy, Shaw and both the prime minister and leader of the oppposition. This distinguished gathering was not strictly necessary for the job at hand, because Hardy’s coffin merely contained his ashes — all that there was room for in Poets’ Corner. At exactly the same time in Dorset, at a smaller funeral, a casket containing Hardy’s unincinerated heart was being borne to its final resting place alongside his parents and his first wife in the churchyard at Stinsford. As Mark Ford observes, this macabre compromise between the nation’s and the author’s

Lady Anne Barnard is a name that means almost nothing today, but her story is a remarkable one. She defied all the expectations governing the behaviour of upper-class women in 18th-century society, yet she made a success of her life. She died leaving six volumes of unpublished autobiography with a stern injunction that her papers were never to be published. For 200 years her memoirs have languished in the family archive, and Stephen Taylor is the first biographer to reveal her secrets. Anne was the daughter of a threadbare Scottish peer, Lord Balcarres, and she grew up the eldest of 11 children in a prisonlike tower house in Fife. Pushed

Looking for the Outsider is the biography of a novel, from conception through publication to critical reception. Alice Kaplan’s life-story of L’Étranger (The Outsider in English translations, The Stranger in American) is a lovely work, lucid and thought-provoking. It makes one feel afresh the sheer strangeness of Albert Camus’s imagination. All genius is, perhaps, freakish; but Camus’s sprang from peculiarly unpromising soil. He was born in a white working-class area of Algiers. His father was killed in the battle of the Marne before he was one. His mother was deaf and illiterate, with a vocabulary of about 400 words; she worked as a cleaner. His uncle was also deaf and

In March 1981 Margaret Thatcher went to the hospital bedside of Maurice Oldfield, the former head of the Secret Intelligence Service, who was dying of stomach cancer. She found him surrounded by his brothers and sisters, whom she gently asked to leave as she needed to ‘speak privately with Sir Maurice’. When they trooped back after her departure, they found their brother, hitherto calm and resigned about his illness, distraught and weeping. It was the first time any of them had seen him in tears. In answer to their question what was wrong, he answered: ‘Mrs Thatcher asked if I was homosexual. I had to tell her.’ It was the

France’s problems today should lessen the condescension of posterity towards Louis XVI. Presidents of the Republic have proved just as incapable as the King of reforming privileged corporations — stemming the flight of skills and capital — and winning popular confidence. Louis XVI’s failure to manage France after 1789 is easier to understand after reading John Hardman’s complex , well-researched, gripping 500-page biography . Louis XVI’s greatest problem was the French national debt. It had reached four billion livres — accumulated over many wars — and there was an annual deficit of 100 million livres. As a result, Hardman points out, in the 1780s, whereas the British government could borrow