Biography
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As an in-depth curation of a publisher’s interactions with one of his authors, Dear Mr. Beckett is something of a Curate’s Egg – but what makes it entirely fascinating is that the author concerned is none other than Samuel Beckett, and the publisher the visionary Barney Rosset (who also successfully fought to get Lady Chatterly’s…
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In many respects Samantha Harvey’s The Shapeless Unease is a remarkable little book, an easy fusion between fiction, memoir, and a battle with insomnia. It’s no wonder it was long-listed for the Booker Prize. For once the blurb on the back cover is perfectly accurate. I picked up my copy in the remainders section of…
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I rarely agree with blurb on the front cover of books – but in the case of Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body & Other Parties I can only concur: “brilliantly inventive”. This is a raw roller-coaster of a read which takes no prisoners. It shies away from nothing; indeed, Machado deliberately goes deep into her…
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Part biography, part critique, part chat – there’s an awful lot to like about Judi Dench’s depiction of her career in Shakespeare’s plays. Laid out as conversations with her friend and fellow actor Brendan O’Hea, Dench takes us through all the Shakespearean roles she’s tackled, play-by-play. And we are rewarded with so much: an actor’s…
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Is it fanciful to assume that one only reads biographies about people you are interested in? And if that is the case, does it mean we turn to page 1 predisposed to suppose we are going to enjoy the book? Whether that is true or not, Stefan Kanfer’s biography of Humphrey Bogart, “Tough without a…
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Having finally got round to finishing reading it, I can say I really enjoyed Paul O’Keeffe’s “Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis”. It seems to me that O’Keeffe has managed the book’s tone and balance really well; navigating between fact and narrative can be difficult when it comes to biography. We are…
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I have just read Charles Bukowski’s Ham on Rye in double-quick time. It’s urgent, powerful, raw – and like Henry Chinaski himself, doesn’t pull any punches. It’s a book which also peels back layers on society, on belonging (and not belonging), on the treadmill of vacuous routine. Pointlessness is never very far away, and romance…
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As I was trying to get back to sleep this morning (before I gave up and came down to my study an hour earlier than I’d intended) it stuck me how many remarkable things I had done in my life. And that it can be good to stand back and take stock. I have taught…
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While some of the pieces may not have travelled that well through time, William Golding’s collection of short non-fiction – “The Hot Gates” – remains a delight. The breadth on Golding’s menu is extraordinary: Ancient Greece, the English Channel, Stratford-upon-Avon, a kind of critique of “War and Peace” – as well as his own “Lord…