Biography Recent Picks

August 2009

The title-underlined links will take you directly to our catalogue.
Some featured items are linked via a book cover to enable you to read more reviews.

The Grand Turk : Sultan Mehmet II - conqueror of Constantinople, master of an empire and lord of two seas, John Freely.
"Whenever I'm asked to recommend a book about Turkey, I reply, 'Anything by John Freely'. This latest work is a marvellous example of Freely's ability to convey the sweep of history by telling us about the outsized characters who shaped it. Mehmet the Conqueror, who captured Constantinople at the age of 21 and went on to reshape the world, has never seemed as alive as he does on these pages." (Stephen Kinzer, former New York Times correspondent and author of 'Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds')

High society : Grace Kelly and Hollywood, Donald Spoto.
"In just seven years (from 1950 through 1956), Grace Kelly made eleven feature films. They established her as one of the screen's iconic beauties, and as a performer of rare intelligence and wit. Initially, she was sustained by the old studio system, which exerted often punitive control over the life and work of its contract players. But Grace Kelly was not a woman who believed in being subservient to anyone or anything. She refused to submit to the pervasive influence of the movie moguls, thus effectively changing the old rules about how actors ought to behave. After her departure from Hollywood, the film-making capital of the world was never the same again. Drawing on a series of taped interviews with Grace Kelly which have never been published anywhere, Donald Spoto examines the transformation of a convent girl from Philadelphia, raised in wealth during the Depression, to New York print model to television actress to the last star of Hollywood's Golden Age to European princess." (Inside Flap)

A brief history of Henry VIII : reformer and tyrant, Derek Wilson.
"Henry VIII changed the course of English life more completely than any monarch since the Conquest. In the portraits of Holbein, Henry Tudor stands proud as one of the most powerful figures in renaissance Europe. But is the portrait just a bluff? In his new book, Derek Wilson explores the myths behind the image of the Tudor Lion. He was the monarch that delivered the Reformation to England yet Luther called him 'A fool, a liar and a damnable rotten worm'. As a young man he gained a reputation as an intellectual and fair prince yet he ruled the nation like a tyrant. He treated his subjects as cruelly as he treated his wives. Based on a wealth of new material and a life time's knowledge of the subject Derek Wilson exposes a new portrait of a much misunderstood King." (Book Jacket)

In tearing haste : letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor, edited by Charlotte Mosley.
"In spring 1956, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire - youngest of the six legendary Mitford sisters - invited the writer and war hero Patrick Leigh Fermor to visit Lismore Castle, the Devonshires' house in Ireland. This halcyon visit sparked off a deep friendship and a lifelong exchange of sporadic but highly entertaining letters. There can rarely have been such contrasting styles: Debo, unashamed philistine and self-professed illiterate (though suspected by her friends of being a secret reader), darts from subject to subject while Paddy, polyglot, widely read prose virtuoso, replies in the fluent, polished manner that has earned him recognition as one of the finest writers in the English language. Prose notwithstanding, the two friends have much in common: a huge enjoyment of life, youthful high spirits, warmth, generosity and lack of malice. There are glimpses of President Kennedy's inauguration, weekends at Sandringham, stag hunting in France, filming with Errol Flynn in French Equatorial Africa and, above all, of life at Chatsworth, the great house that Debo spent much of her life restoring, and of Paddy in the house that he and his wife Joan designed and built on the southernmost peninsula of Greece." (Amazon.co.uk)

Not becoming my mother : and other things she taught me along the way, Ruth Reichl.
"This book chronicles the mother-daughter relationship of culinary author Ruth Reichl, now editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine, and her late mother, Miriam. Miriam Brudno, who bowed to societal and familial pressure to become a wife and a mother over pursuing a fulfilling career, cheered her daughter on and pointed out that Ruth had an obligation, both to herself and to her mother, to use her life well." (Amazon.co.uk)

The Hemingses of Monticello : an American family, Annette Gordon-Reed.
"This epic work tells the story of the Hemings family, whose close blood ties to the third president of America had been systematically expunged from history until very recently.Now, historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed traces the Hemingses from their origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the family's dispersal after Thomas Jefferson's death in 1826. It brings to life not only Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson but also their children and Hemings' siblings, who shared a father with Jefferson's wife, Martha. "The Hemingses of Moticello" sets the family's compelling saga against the backdrop of revolutionary America, Paris on the eve of revolution, 1790s Philadelphia and plantation life at Monticello, Jefferson's estate in Virginia. Much anticipated, this book promises to be the most detailed history of an American slave family ever written." ( Amazon.co.uk)

Park : the biography of Air Chief Marshal Sir Keith Park, by Vincent Orange ; with an introduction by Christopehr Shores.
"If ever any one man won the Battle of Britain, he did. I don't believe it is realized how much that one man, with his leadership, his calm judgement and his skill, did to save not only this country, but the world. So wrote Marshal of the RAF Lord Tedder in 1947. As commander of No. 11 Group, Fighter Command and responsible for the air defence of London and South-East England, Keith Park took charge of the day-to-day direction of the battle. In spotlighting his thoughts and actions during the crisis, the author reveals a man whose unfailing energy, courage and cool resourcefulness won not only supreme praise from Churchill but the lasting respect and admiration of all who served under him." (Amazon.co.uk)

The lost child : a true story, Julie Myerson.
"One bleak, late winter's day, Julie Myerson finds herself in a graveyard, looking for traces of a young woman who died nearly two centuries before. As a child in Regency England, Mary Yelloly painted an exquisite album of watercolours that uniquely reflected the world she lived in. But Mary died at the age of twenty-one, and when Julie comes across this album, she is haunted by the potential never realised, the barely-lived life cut short. And most of all, she is reminded of her own child. Because only days earlier, Julie and her husband locked their eldest son out of the family home. He was just seventeen." ( Amazon.co.uk)

Ways of life : on places, painters and poets : selected essays and reviews 1994-2008, Andrew Motion.
"Andrew Motion was appointed Poet Laureate in 1999, but alongside his work as a poet he also had a significant career as a prize-winning biographer and an illuminating critic. "Ways of Life" celebrates this talent with a selection of his articles about painters and poets, as well as a number of striking personal pieces. The literary essays in "Ways of Life" look at a wide assortment of writers, from John Clare and Ivor Gurney, to marginal figures such as Leigh Hunt and Joseph Severn, and reassess the less well-known work of celebrated writers including John Donne, Christina Rossetti and Thomas Hardy. "Ways of Life" is an original, acute and emotionally-charged collection of writings, from a truly important and insightful writer." (Amazon.co.uk)

The locust and the bird : my mother's story, Hanan Al-Shaykh ; translated from the Arabic by Roger Allen.
"New York, 2001 As Hanan al-Shaykh travels through the streets of Manhattan to her daughter's wedding her mind is elsewhere. Remembering own secret ceremony some thirty years ago, her thoughts turn to her mother, Kamila, who was sacrificed into marriage: her absent mother who, in recent, reconciled years, has pleaded with Hanan, her daughter the writer, to tell this story. Lebanon, 1934. Kamila is nine years old when she is taken from the poverty of her childhood village in southern Lebanon to Beirut. Though she has never learned to read or write, stories, poetry and films are her passion, and she longs to go to school. Instead, she is to lead a life of domestic servitude - and worse, she has been secretly betrothed to her brother-in-law, Abu-Hussein, a man eighteen years her senior." (Amazon.co.uk)

Previous Biography Recent Pick edition.