Helen Gurley Brown became an “overnight” success in 1962 with her international bestseller Sex and the Single Girl. Editor of Cosmopolitan magazine for 32 years, when she finished she left her readers with three pieces of advice – read Bad girls go everywhere: the life of Helen Gurly Brown by Jennifer Scanlon to find out what they were.

Arthur Ransome is best remembered for Swallows and Amazons but previously he led a very different life in Russia as a spokesman for violence and oppression. The last Englishman: the double life of Arthur Ransome by Roland Chambers follows the transition to successful published children’s writer.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was adapted to a successful stage-play and film and the best known of Muriel Spark’s work. In 1992 she invited Martin Stannard to write her biography giving him full access to interviews and papers. Muriel Spark: the biography is the result and covers both the highlights and her darker moments.

Read about these people and others including Titian, Alan Bennett, Francis Coty in this month’s Biography Recent Picks.

It is said that Ngaio Marsh was New Zealand’s first author to sell one million copies of her mystery stories but her life makes for just as exciting a read. Read about her “luvvies”, her Bohemian lifestyle, her love of theatre and her spurned suitor in Ngaio Marsh: her life in crime by Joanne Drayton.

Helen Clark: a political life by Denis Welch is an unauthorised biography following her rise in New Zealand’s political landscape. Her time in politics began with the anti-war protests of 1968 and Helen Clark has seen and been a part of huge political change over the last 40 years. In 2006 Forbes magazine listed her a the 20th most powerful woman in the world.

The romance of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor has been called by many as the greatest love story of the 20th century and shook British royalty to the core. In his new book, Mrs Simpson: secret lives of the Duchess of Windsor Charles Higham revisits the life of the Duchess of Windsor with updated information that will add yet another twist to the life of the fascinating woman.

Other titles in the month’s Biography Recent Picks include Florence Nightingale, Coco Chanel, Joan Root and Cornelius Vanderbilt. Have a look!

Grace Kelly made eleven feature films in just seven years which quickly established her as one of Hollywood’s iconic figures. High society: Grace Kelly and Hollywood by Donald Spoto draws on a series of taped interviews that follows her life from convent girl to model to television actress to screen idol to European princess. Her departure from Hollywood definitely left a gap.

Much has been written about Henry VIII and not always flattering. In Derek Wilson’s book A brief history of Henry VIII: reformer and tyrant he explores the myths behind the image and presents a new look at this fascinating King.

Not becoming my mother: and other things she taught me along the way by culinary author Ruth Reichl follows her relationship with her mother who encouraged her daughter to choose her own path.

Read about these people along wtih other books about The Grand Turk, Sir Keith Park and Andrew Motion (UK Poet Laureate) in August’s Biography Recent Picks.

This film, written as a gift for Marilyn Monroe by her husband Arthur Miller about a despairing divorcee was a case of art imitating life. Although their marriage ended just months after filming she remained an integral part of Miller’s work for the next 40 years. The genius and the goddess : Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe by Jeffrey Meyers covers their life together and interactions with Hollywood and the literary elite.

When Michael J. Fox became unwell no-one expected the diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease. Following on from his first memoir Lucky Man, his new book  Always looking up : the adventures of an incurable optimist gives insight to a man who feels his glass is definitely half-full.

Daughters of shame by Jasvinder Sanghera are true stories about the lives of vulnerable women in many societies where they have no status and no say in their future. Sanghera has experienced this personally and works to aid these women, putting herself at risk so that others can live without fear.

Read more about these books and others looking at the lives of Catherine the Great, Diana Mosley, and Mary Moody via the Biography Recent Picks.

Few people have one dish named after them let alone two. Born in 1861  Helen Porter Mitchell took her stage name from the city of her birth, Melbourne.  Oscar Hammerstein stated that “nobody ever has or ever will sing like Nellie Melba” and her tours in the U.S. even led to the term “Melbamania”.   Ann Blainey’s Marvelous Melba : the extraordinary life of a great Diva outlines just how internationally famous she was.

Killing my own snakes : a memoir is an autobiographical book by Dame Ann Leslie, a reporter with over 40 years experience. Her first column in Fleet Street headlined “She’s young, she’s provocative and she’s only 22″ at a time when age and gender mattered. Whether interviewing film stars or reporting news from war zones she was always seen in full make-up and false eyelashes!

Simon Louvish the author of Chaplin : the tramp’s odyssey describes Chaplin as a figure of multiple paradoxes. Considering his rags to riches life this is not surprising. Left in an orphanage at five he became the richest man in Hollywood. This biography gives a new insight to Chaplin’s colourful life.

Read more about these fascinating people and others including Gabriel Garcia Marquez and John Grogan (author of the film Marley and me) in this month’s Recent Biography Picks.

We offer a wide selection of biographies at Wellington City Libraries this month. You can learn more about John Julius Norwich, a British writer, broadcaster and TV personality. Three historical queens and their unfortunate daughters’ lives are portrayed in Royal mothers, tragic daughters. The novelist Andre Brink tells of his life and loves in his memoir A fork in the road. You can find out about the royal mistress Katherine Swynford and the Derby winner and six-times married Etti Plesch. Barack Obama’s life is reviewed by the New York Times, and the experience of a Bosnian refugee in England is recounted. Finally, if you are interested by New Zealand biographies, check out this month’s Biography Recent Picks. 

In the New Yorker magazine of September 8th 2008, Alec Baldwin bemoans the fact that he is not Leonardo De Caprio.

“To be Leo!…To play the role that is the fizz in the drink, you know what I mean? You are the movie!”

The profile is full of that hyper, intense sense Baldwin has of himself. Baldwin is his own best role, and, as if to prove this to himself and to us he has resuscitated an almost terminally stalled career.

He’s released an inconsistently reviewed memoir, ‘A promise to ourselves,’ that promises, at the start of every chapter, to be fair, to his ex-wife, his daughter, the American judicial system, his lawyers (Baldwin is involved in one of the more protracted and prominent custody battles in Hollywood at the moment) and then proceeds to criticise each for extended periods. It’s entertaining in its own train-wreck way, like a sparkler throwing off malicious sparks.

Grammy winning TV series ‘30Rock,’ currently has Baldwin at its frenetic centre playing an egotistical CEO Everyman: management-plus, assertive to a fault and unfailingly funny.

‘I wish I could play the lead role in one movie, one great movie,’ Baldwin says in his New Yorker profile, ‘Why Me?’

Mickey Rourke suprised this year with a comeback so unexpected it seemed pure fiction.

Why not Alec Baldwin?

Widely known as the ‘Nine Days Queen’, Lady Jane Grey was the unfortunate victim of Elizabeth I’s ascent to the throne. The fate of her sisters remained mysterious until the publication of The sisters who would be queen : the tragedy of Mary, Katherine & Lady Jane Grey, a book that reveals the doomed lives of the siblings. Amongst the other biographies we have to offer this month are that of the first US female TV presenter Barbara Walters, as well as the mysterious Edgar Allan Poe and the imaginative Janice Galloway. Our selection also includes items about Robert Mugabe, Alice King (a wine-writer), and Ernest Jones (the official biographer of Sigmund Freud). And if you want to follow the saga of an Austrian family during the first half of the twentieth century, check out this month’s Biography Recent Picks.

New biographies for July involve vile kings, a disillusioned Red Guard, an incomparable salon hostess, the original Angry Young Man, a gentlemen explorer-adventurer and a German cousin’s mysterious disappearance. James Wyllie’s biography ‘The warlord and the renegade’ investigates the lives of Hermann Goering, Hitler’s most trusted henchman, and his anti-Nazi brother Albert.

We have new Biographies this month about aristocrats, celebrity chefs, wildlife artists and NZers Jacqueline Fahey and Gordon Tietjens. ‘I have heard you calling in the night : a memoir’ by Thomas Healy shows how the life of this alcoholic writer was turned around when he bought a Dobermann puppy.