biography
Sunday Book: Ruth Franklin - Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted LifeSunday, 11 December 2016
When asked about her most famous short story, "The Lottery", Shirley Jackson said, “I hate it. I’ve lived with that thing 15 years. Nobody will ever let me forget it.” Sixty-eight years later, it’s seared into the American psyche and has been a set... Read more... |
Who was St Clair Bayfield?Thursday, 05 May 2016
This week Stephen Frears's film about Florence Foster Jenkins opens. It will bring to the widest attention yet the story of a New York socialite who couldn’t sing and yet did sing, infamously, to a packed Carnegie Hall at the age of 76 in 1944.... Read more... |
Jeepers Creepers, Leicester Square TheatreMonday, 01 February 2016
You might think that the combination of a play about one of the funniest comics of the second half of the 20th century, written by his biographer and directed by a member of Monty Python would be a winning one. But sadly Robert Ross's Jeepers... Read more... |
Dawn French, Vaudeville TheatreFriday, 13 November 2015
When is a comedian not funny? Dawn French has spent so much of her life making audiences laugh that her debut as a one-woman performer requires some recalibration. The next-door smile is as big as ever, and the eagerness to be liked, so the early... Read more... |
DVD: HockneyTuesday, 16 December 2014
Since David Hockney entered his eighth decade (he is now 77), we seem to have witnessed an accelerated output of major exhibitions, biographies and documentaries. The public appetite has never tired of this most tireless of artists, but it’s an... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Biographer Claire Tomalin on Charles DickensMonday, 03 February 2014
The tally of Charles Dickens’s biographers grows ever closer to 100. The English language’s most celebrated novelist repays repeated study, of course, because both his life and his work are so remarkably copious: the novels, the journals, the... Read more... |
Lives in Music #4: The Book of Drugs by Mike DoughtyFriday, 21 December 2012
Such is the warts and all nature of the rock star biography that something as personal as the addiction memoir has become almost passé. Lucky then that Mike Doughty – one-time frontman of cult 90s alt-rockers Soul Coughing turned eclectic solo... Read more... |
Lives in Music #1: Rod the AutobiographyTuesday, 18 December 2012
What makes a good rock biography? Sex, naturally. Drugs, frequently. Rock’n’roll, obviously. None of the above are in short supply in Rod Stewart’s account of a long life spent howling into microphones and knocking up blondes. He came, he snorted,... Read more... |
Extract: In Two Minds - Jonathan MillerThursday, 06 December 2012
When I first mentioned to a colleague that I was embarking on a biography of the doctor/director Jonathan Miller, he instantly yelped, “My God, your work’s cut out! The man must have met half the famous names in the twentieth century!"My subsequent... Read more... |
Beautiful Minds, BBC FourThursday, 26 April 2012
Apart from the fact that it’s a razor-sharp piece of writing, what most delights and impresses me about Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion is how it gets under people’s skin. It has generated several books in fevered opposition to it and, needless to... Read more... |
Lucian Freud: Painted Life, BBC TwoSunday, 19 February 2012
He was uncompromising, honest, personal. He didn't like doing what he was told. He never followed fashion. Is this an accurate picture of Lucian Freud, or is it a description of almost every great artist who ever lived? The intensely banal voiceover... Read more... |
The Many Faces of Dame Judi Dench, BBC TwoSaturday, 31 December 2011
It's interesting to consider at what point in someone's career does he or she become a national treasure - as Alan Bennett once so scathingly remarked, “If you live to be 90 in England and can still eat a boiled egg they think you deserve the Nobel... Read more... |
