biography

In the summer of 1933, four women, all in their 20s, were busy contemplating the meaning of their own existence and the importance of others to it. The word existentialism had not yet been invented, but the quartet were intrigued by the idea of finding a new philosophy, using their own intelligence to change themselves and the world, while working out how the individual and the collective played into the malaise of modern times. Over the next decade, as Wolfram Eilenberger writes, they all crossed paths intellectually,…

On the Shelf Beyond the Story: 10-Year Record of BTS By Myeongseok KangTranslated by Anton Hur, Slin Jung and Clare RichardsFlatiron: 544 pages, $45If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. The K-pop juggernaut known as BTS has dominated the American music scene in an unprecedented way. The group’s seven members — RM, Jin, SUGA, j-hope, Jimin, V and Jungkook — have performed at the Grammys and the American Music Awards,…

Do you know that director Mrinal Sen’s wife, Gita, did not touch a rosogolla in her life? And why did she deprive herself of the syrupy sweet that is part of Bengali identity? Because she didn’t have the money to buy a rosogolla for her dying father when he had asked for one. Many of us also did not know that Kunal, Mrinal Sen’s only child, an early PhD in Artificial Intelligence, always addressed his father as “bondhu”, the Bengali word for “friend”. That’s why he felt that Bondhu would be the ideal title for a book on…

Mirjam and Ludwik were both born into prosperous families. Both had happy early childhoods. Like millions of others, both had their lives shattered by the second world war. Mirjam was caught with her mother and sisters in the occupied Netherlands, living under increasingly oppressive Nazi rule before being moved to the Dutch holding camp for Jews at Westerbork, and then Belsen. Ludwik, who grew up in Poland, was exiled to eastern Kazakhstan by the Soviets with his mother, where they lived through a Siberian winter with…

When the cult singer-songwriter Nick Drake’s third album, Pink Moon, was released in 1972 many of his friends were horrified. Now held to be a stone-cold classic, it is a spare, beautiful sequence of songs, many of which lay bare its 24-year-old author’s inner tumult. Drake’s two previous albums, Five Leaves Left (1969) and Bryter Layter (1971), had sold poorly. Although he was an English singer-guitarist whose unconventional tunings and numinous lyrics set him apart, even in a crowded folk revival field, a chasm had…

Though he worked for the BBC for two and a half years and often spoke on air, no recording of George Orwell’s voice has been found. Many friends and memoirists have described it, and his struggles to make himself audible (all the more so after a sniper’s bullet went through his throat in Spain), but their accounts vary: was his voice high-pitched or husky, old Etonian or a Cockney drawl? DJ Taylor settles for calling it deadpan, but its elusiveness seems apt.Orwell was one of the great voices of the 20th century. But the…

Another title for this enthralling family memoir might be the “would-be-goods”. The phrase was coined by E Nesbit of Railway Children fame, who was also a co-founder of the Fabian Society, but it perfectly encapsulates the middle-class liberal-left tradition that Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee can trace back through her family for generations. As well as her parents and grandparents there are cousins and great-aunts, all educated, clever, public service-oriented men and women anguishing over a set of subjects that have…

Who was the Rev Martin Luther King Jr? In America, the civil rights activist and Baptist minister is now embraced across the political spectrum even as the teaching of the history of discrimination and segregation that shaped him is being actively suppressed in many parts of the country. Beyond the US, he is widely celebrated in nations confronting difficult questions about their own racial pasts.At the time of his assassination in 1968, however, most Americans had a negative view of him, and the National Security Agency…

Boris Johnson has been accused of many, many things over the years. But the parties and the lies, the sleaze and the juicier scandals don’t seem to interest historians Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell much. Their central complaint in this utterly scathing account of his time at No 10 is the more fundamental one that, as they put it, he “never understood how to be prime minister, nor how to govern”; that he didn’t know what he was doing, barely bothered learning, and was so lacking in moral seriousness that even when he…

On New Year’s Day 1956, Jim Ede, then 60, wrote to his friend, the painter and poet David Jones, of a “quixotic scheme” he had for the remaining years of his life. Ede, who had been a curator at the Tate Gallery before the second world war, and a pioneering collector of the art of his friends and heroes – Jones, and the St Ives group of painters, and Miró and Brancusi – outlined in that letter an impulse to create a modest and lasting monument to what he had learned about art and about life.Ede had in mind, he wrote, “a…