Biography Recent Picks

October 2009

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Muriel Spark : the biography, Martin Stannard.
Born in 1918 into a working-class Edinburgh family, Muriel Spark ended as the epitome of literary chic, one of the great writers of the twentieth century. It is a Cinderella story, the first thirty-nine years of which she presented in her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae (1992), politely blurring the intensity of her darker moments: her relations with her brother, mother, son, husband; a terrifying period of hallucinations and subsequent depression; and the disastrously misplaced love she had felt for two men she had wanted to marry, Howard Sergeant and Derek Stanford. Aged nineteen, Spark left Scotland to marry in Southern Rhodesia, escaping back to Britain on a troopship in 1944 after her divorce. Her son returned in 1945 to be brought up by her parents in Edinburgh while she established herself as a poet and critic in London. After becoming a Roman Catholic in 1954, she began a novel, The Comforters (1957), and with Memento Mori and The ballad of Peckham Rye rose rapidly into the literary stratosphere. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), with its adaptation into a successful stage-play and film, marked her full translation into international celebrity and from that point she went to live first in New York, then Rome, and finally Tuscany where for over thirty years, until her death in 2006, she shared a house with her companion, the artist Penelope Jardine. In 1992 Spark invited Martin Stannard to write her biography, offering interviews and full access to her papers. The result is a compelling portrait of an extraordinary life. (Amazon.co.uk)

Francois Coty : fragrance, power, money, Roulhac B. Toledano and Elizabeth Z. Coty.
This is a thrilling biography of Francois Coty - the visionary who revolutionised the fragrance industry. Artist, financier, politician, industrialist, philanthropist, and above all, parfumeur - Francois Coty revolutionized the fragrance industry during the first part of the twentieth century and gave the world such legendary scents as Chypre and La Rose Jacqueminot. Born in 1874, in the same house as his relative and idol Napoleon Bonaparte, Coty was orphaned at the age of seven. He spent his childhood under the care of Jesuit priests and distant family in Ajaccio, Corsica. After a brief stint in the French army, he became a parliamentary attache for a prominent Parisian senator. Coty spent the next four years absorbing Paris' political and cultural scene before discovering his extraordinarily sensitive sense of smell. He set out to create his first fragrance in 1904, and by 1906, he was a millionaire. Drawing on Coty's personal correspondence, memoranda, and papers, this is a masterful biography of the "Emperor of Fragrance" and France's first billionaire. (Amazon.co.uk)

Bad girls go everywhere : the life of Helen Gurley Brown, by Jennifer Scanlon.
Born in Arkansas to a family of modest means, Helen Gurley Brown worked at countless secretarial jobs and was an advertising executive before writing the 1962 international bestseller Sex and the Single Girl, marrying the love of her life, becoming the diva of the New York magazine world, and editing Cosmopolitan magazine for 32 years. In her farewell column in 1997, Brown offered her Cosmo readers three pieces of advice: every woman has something that makes her unique and gifted; men are not the enemy; and sex is among the best things in life. With these brief directives Brown summarized the philosophy that made her such an important and contested figure throughout the second half of the twentieth century.

A life like other people's , Alan Bennett.
Alan Bennett's poignant memoir recounts the marriage of his parents, the lives and deaths of his aunts and the uncovering of a long-held secret. First published in the acclaimed collection Untold Stories, this tender, intimate family portrait beautifully captures the minutiae of the Bennetts' domestic life: their disappointments and pleasures, tragedies and successes, and underlying it all, their suspicion that they were somehow different to and lesser than other people. (Amazon.co.uk)

Bobby and Jackie : a love story, C. David Heymann.
The bestselling author uses his impressive list of sources and impeccable insight to reveal the true story of the relationship between Jacqueline Kennedy and her brother-in-law, Robert F. Kennedy. Their affair has been an open secret for decades amongst Kennedy insiders. Now, C. David Heymann will share those secrets with the thousands of readers out there who still can't get enough Kennedy lore. (Amazon.co.uk)

From a clear blue sky, Timothy Knatchbull.
On the August bank holiday weekend in 1979, 14-year-old Timothy Knatchbull went out on a boat trip off the shore of Mullaghmore in County Sligo, Ireland. It was a trip that would cost four lives - and change his own for ever. The IRA bomb that exploded in their boat killed Knatchbull's grandfather Lord Mountbatten, his grandmother Lady Brabourne, his twin brother Nicholas, and local teenager Paul Maxwell. In telling this story for the first time, Knatchbull is not only revisiting the terrible events he and his family lived through, but also writing an intensely personal account of human triumph over tragedy. (Amazon.co.uk)

Titian : the last days, by Mark Hudson.
Towards the end of his life Titian didn't finish his paintings. The elderly artist kept them in his studio, never quite completing them, as though wanting to endlessly postpone the moment of closure. Created with the fingers as much as the brush, Titian's last paintings are imbued with a sense of final, desperate effort - a rawness and immediacy that weren't to be seen again in art for centuries. But what did Titian, who experienced as much in the way of material success as any artist before or since, mean by these works? Are they a harrowing, final testament or simply a collection of unfinished paintings? In the outbreak of plague that finally killed him, Titian's studio was looted, and many paintings taken. What happened to them is not known. This book is a quest - a journey through Titian's life and work, towards the physical and spiritual landscape of his last paintings. (Amazon.co.uk)

Love child : a memoir of family lost and found, Allegra Houston.
When Allegra Huston was four years old, her mother was killed in a car crash. Soon afterwards, she was introduced to an intimidating man wreathed in cigar smoke - the legendary film director John Huston - with the words, 'This is your father'. So began an extraordinary odyssey: from the magical Huston estate in Ireland, to the Long Island suburbs, to a hidden paradise in Mexico - and, at the side of her older sister, Anjelica, into the hilltop retreats of Jack Nicholson, Ryan O'Neal, and Marlon Brando. Allegra's is the penetrating gaze of an outsider never quite sure if she belongs in this rarefied world, and of a motherless child trying to make sense of her famous, fragmented family. Then, at the age of twelve, Allegra's precarious sense of self is shattered when she is, once more, introduced to her father - her real one, this time, the British aristocrat and historian John Julius Norwich. (Amazon.co.uk)

The other Elizabeth Taylor, Nicola Beauman.
This is the first biography of one of the outstanding English writers of the last century. Betty Coles became Elizabeth Taylor upon her marriage in 1936 when she was 23. Her first novel appeared in the same year, 1945, as the actress Elizabeth Taylor was appearing in National Velvet and began her ascent to stardom. Meanwhile, over the next thirty years, 'the other Elizabeth Taylor' lived and worked in Buckinghamshire and published eleven more novels and four volumes of short stories. Nicola Beauman's biography draws on a wealth of hitherto undiscovered material, which includes the wartime letters Elizabeth Taylor wrote to her lover.

The last Englishman : the double life of Arthur Ransome, Roland Chambers.
Arthur Ransome is best remembered as the author of the series of books that began with Swallows and Amazons and sold millions of copies around the world. But before he became the jolly Lakeland storyteller, offering idyllic images of brave children messing about in boats, Ransome had spent a decade in Russia and lived a very different life as a spokesman for authoritarianism and violence. He went there in 1913 as a struggling young freelance writer and made friends with leading Russian liberals, and wrote a fine book of tales based on Russian folk legends. But as the country sank into chaos and war, Ransome was caught up in the whirlwind of revolution. (Amazon.co.uk)

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