Biography

How do you write a group biography of people who never actually formed a group? Such is the challenge Wolfram Eilenberger sets himself in a book about the philosophers Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin and — the surprisingly unstarry fourth subject — Ernst Cassirer, an urbane and now nearly forgotten neo-Kantian who might have deserved the made-up title of ‘symbologist’, thus far reserved for the heroes of Dan Brown’s novels. What these men have in common is that they spoke German and were philosophically active during the 1920s, but that is about it. Heidegger and Cassirer met and traded rhetorical blows at a celebrated philosophy conference in Davos; Benjamin

Reinhold Messner, the first person to climb all 14 of the planet’s peaks higher than 8,000 metres, is probably the finest high-altitude mountaineer in history. His list of astonishing achievements on dangerous ice-clad crags includes the first solo ascent of Mount Everest without use of oxygen. Yet as he sat exhausted at 26,000 feet with two days still to go on that pioneering ascent, he thought of an eccentric Englishman ‘tougher than I am’ who had set out before him with one crippled arm and no crampons, let alone knowledge of some basic climbing techniques. ‘Do I understand this madman so well because I am mad myself?’ he wondered. Now

Sybille Bedford died in 2006, just short of 95. She left four novels, a travel book, two volumes of legal process and a memoir. Selina Hastings has written a wonderful biography, with lashings of lesbian lovers, which provides a soundtrack to one version of the 20th century. Born German in 1911, Bedford grew up in a schloss in Baden’s Feldkirch, near the French border, her father a Bavarian Catholic baron and old soldier, her mother a beautiful and unstable bolter. ‘Her childhood,’ writes Hastings, whose previous books include lives of Nancy Mitford, Somerset Maugham and Evelyn Waugh, ‘was both intellectually inspirational and… emotionally deprived.’ Both parents were wealthy. Short and

In late April 1962 Los Angeles police shot and killed an unarmed black man, Ronald X Stokes, during a disturbance outside a Nation of Islam temple. Malcolm X, then the second most powerful figure in the NOI, rushed to the city. At a rally he told protesters: ‘You’re brutalised because you’re black, and when they lay a club on the side of your head, they do not ask your religion. You’re black, that’s enough.’ Sound familiar? The Dead Are Arising, a new biography of Malcolm X, is timely. But perhaps this sobering book’s clearest message is that it will always be timely, because the story it narrates is timeless. In

Twenty-five years after making Spartacus, a parable of Roman decadence and rebellious slaves shot in California, Stanley Kubrick made Full Metal Jacket, a ’Nam flick shot in Beckton. Ever the perfectionist, Kubrick had imported palm trees from Africa, the better that the local gas works resemble downtown Hué. Alas, he wasn’t happy. Something about the clouds over east London wasn’t right, and as for the sunsets… Meanwhile, the crew and cast and hordes of extras thumb-twiddled in the silence Kubrick demanded. Then an extra kicked up: ‘Get him off the crane.’ An assistant was despatched to find the guilty party. ‘You’re working with Stanley Kubrick,’ he lectured the rhubarbers. ‘No

Jeoffry is, by now, one of the best-known cats in literary history. And unlike the Cheshire Cat, Mr Mistoffelees, Orlando, The Cat That Walked By Himself, Gobbolino or Behemoth in The Master and Margarita, he really existed. Protagonist of the most anthologised section of the mad poet Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, the eccentrically spelled ginger tom now takes a fresh lease of fictionalised life in this jeu d’esprit. Oliver Soden’s ‘biography’ of Jeoffry takes its most obvious bearings from another novelised animal biography, Virginia Woolf’s life of Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s cocker spaniel, Flush. It is, if you’ll forgive me, a pretty feline performance. It’s at once a sly introduction to Christopher

Gilbert in Oscar Wilde’s dialogue ‘The Critic as Artist’: ‘Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.’ Not here. Hermione Lee’s immensely long Tom Stoppard: A Life is expert, engrossing, entertaining and sympathetic to its subject. At its heart is a writer steely in his determination to entertain, an inexhaustible mine of mots, a non-stop genius of jokes, capable of winning the Nobel Prize for the interview as an art form. It comprehensively replaces Ira Nadel’s Double Act (2002), a biography which Stoppard hoped would be ‘as inaccurate as possible’. (Indian Ink and Arcadia are both explicitly hostile to biography and its

‘If you had visited the quaint English village of Great Rollright in 1945, you might have spotted a thin, dark-haired and unusually elegant woman… climbing on to her bicycle,’ Ben Macintyre opens his latest book, like the start of a gentle Ealing comedy. It will come as no surprise to his fans that the elegant Mrs Burton, Cotswolds housewife, baker of excellent cakes, mother of three and wife of a chap called Len who works in the local aluminium factory, is in fact Colonel Ursula Kuczynski of the Red Army, aka Agent Sonya, whose clandestine mission is to help the Soviets build the atomic bomb. Agent Sonya was allocated her

It’s easy to forget that John F. Kennedy lived such a short life. At 43, he was the second youngest president in history; when he died, he was younger than Barack Obama was in 2009. Kennedy’s presidency was brief —‘a thousand days,’ as the historian and Kennedy confidant Arthur Schlesinger Jr memorably put it — but included some of the most intensively covered episodes in modern history, from the civil rights movement to the Cuban Missile Crisis. As a result, JFK has not lacked for attention. So, what more is there to say about him? A good deal, it turns out. Kennedy is familiar yet mysterious, and therefore difficult to

Joseph Conrad’s death made Graham Greene feel, at 19, sitting on a beach in Yorkshire, ‘as if there was a kind of “blank” in the whole of contemporary literature’. Greene’s own death in 1991, aged 87, had a similar effect on many younger writers, myself included. For John le Carré, his most obvious successor, Greene had ‘carried the torch of English literature, almost alone’. His cool fugitive presence, in Martin Amis’s phrase, had been there all our reading lives. In an age of diminishing faith, he had used Catholic parables in a way that lent them a power beyond their biblical origins, mining the gospels rather as le Carré has

Is Boris Johnson a fan of Harry Perry Robinson? If he isn’t, he really ought to be. Reading this absorbing biography, I was struck by how much they have in common — especially in their early lives. Both men went to public school, then on to Oxford, then into journalism, where they proved incapable of writing a dull sentence. They both divorced and remarried — and were also American citizens, for a while. Both dipped a toe into politics, but while Boris took the plunge, Harry stepped back and remained a jobbing hack until his dying day, the finest journalist of his generation. The biggest difference, however, is that Harry