biography

Renowned journalist and author Walter Isaacson announced in a Twitter post on Thursday that his new Elon Musk biography is on the horizon. Isaacson has chronicled the lives of geniuses like Steve Jobs, Jennifer Doudna, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein, but over the last two years, he has shadowed Musk in the hopes of writing yet another bestseller.NPR Is Going Dark on Twitter | Future TechThe book detailing the rise and fall(?)of Musk is currently available for preorder through the Simon and…

As Bruno Schulz, the Jewish writer and artist who is the subject of Benjamin Balint’s new biographical study, once wrote: “urge to sad whimpering to understand in a thousand kaleidoscopic possibilities with the feeling of homelessness”.Well, not quite. These are Schulz’s words – sort of – but translated from the Polish in which he wrote them into English, and I’ve chosen them at random from the strange and extraordinary book Tree of Codes, produced in 2010 by the American novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. It consists of the…

On a brisk morning in 1980, Winnie Mandela went to visit her husband on Robben Island. Nelson Mandela had been there since 1964. For years, he had only been allowed to see one visitor every six months. That day, she did not bring her usual packages of food and papers, but a single bundle: their first grandchild, only a few months old. This was a brazen violation of the rules: children or grandchildren had to be at least 16 years old to see a prisoner. The 62-year-old Mandela begged his young Afrikaner guard to let him…

In 2010, writer and musician Howard Fishman went to a Christmas party at a friend’s house where, not knowing many people, he took to scanning the bookshelves to quell his anxiety. As he did so, a song called Talkin’ Like You (Two Tall Mountains) came on the stereo that, he recalls, “swallowed me. The party froze. The room disappeared.” Set against a backdrop of gentle guitar picking, it was sung by a woman, plaintively and without affectation, about “a place they called Lonesome” where everything, from the nearby brook to…

A children’s biography of King Charles III has topped the UK book chart before the coronation on 6 May.Maria Isabel Sánchez Vegara’s King Charles is part of the Little People, Big Dreams series, which includes illustrated biographies of notable figures such as Stephen Hawking and Michelle Obama.The nonfiction book, illustrated by Matt Hunt, is the first of the Little People, Big Dreams series to reach No 1. It sold 15,786 copies in the seven days to 29 April, overtaking Marian Keyes’ novel Again, Rachel, a sequel to…

A book about a pivotal year in William Shakespeare’s life has been named the Baillie Gifford Winner of Winners in a special announcement to mark the 25th anniversary of the prestigious nonfiction prize.James Shapiro’s 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare originally won the award in 2006, when it was known as the Samuel Johnson prize. He has been honoured again at a ceremony at the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, and will receive £25,000. The chair of judges, the New Statesman’s editor-in-chief Jason…

There’s a feeling you get rewatching a movie that ends in disaster. A hope against hope that this time the hero will cheat fate; that the captain of the Titanic’s desperate attempts to swerve the iceberg will pay off. Maybe that tear in the hull isn’t as bad as it looks? Though the jacket of The Best Minds, novelist Jonathan Rosen’s extraordinary account of his friend Michael Laudor’s mental illness, speaks only of a “horrific act” committed by its subject, readers are well aware that something dreadful is coming. It is…

A dream prospect. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the short-lived, self-destructive wünderkind who made movies about love as masochism, pain as an inevitable condition and history as a dire weight upon his native Germany, has long been in need of an equally forthright celebration. And who better to provide it than one-time NME star, cultural contrarian and film nut Ian Penman, in his first original book since his great comeback suite of music essays, It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track, in 2019? Well, hold your…

If a director or producer were ever tempted to make a female version of the Indiana Jones story, they would need look no further than the life of Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt for inspiration. This was a daredevil whose real-life antics put Hollywood fiction to shame.As a young curator at the Louvre, during the occupation of France, she fought to protect the museum’s greatest treasures from Nazi plunderers – while also working for the resistance and surviving interrogation by the Gestapo. Some of her colleagues did…

Celebrated for her novels, her art installations and her musical collaborations with David Bowie, Tom Waits and Tony Visconti, the artist known as X was, until her death in 1996, one of the more enigmatic cultural figures of the 20th century. She always refused to confirm her place or date of birth, and after she took the pseudonym “X” in 1982, it was never clear which if any of her previous identities – Dorothy Eagle, Clyde Hill, Caroline Walker, Bee Converse – corresponded to her actual name. This is a biography drawing…