biography

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX apart from being a vocal supporter of cryptocurrencies, has confirmed that his biography is being penned by Walter Isaacson. The author is known for his popular biography of late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, and is a professor at Tulane University. This will be the second biography of Musk, with the first one written by Ashlee Vance. The first one was titled “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future” and it was named among the best books of 2015 by several US publications,…

“There is something dazzling about marriage,” writes Clare Carlisle at the start of this wonderful book. “That leap into the open-endedness of another human being.” Prof Carlisle knows about such leaps: she is the biographer of madcap Danish sage Søren Kierkegaard, for whom Abraham’s leap of faith in God is the ultimate act of trust, beyond reason or calculation. Marriage could be like that.George Eliot imagined so. “The very possibility of a constantly growing blessedness in marriage is to me the very basis of good in…

Literary wives are a unique breed, writes Carmela Ciuraru in the introduction to her strange new book – at which point the reader pictures Véra Nabokov either licking Vladimir’s stamps, or pulling the pages of an early draft of Lolita from the fire in which he was attempting to burn it. (“We are keeping this,” she is supposed to have said.) But no sooner has the smoke faded than alarm bells start to ring. It’s not true, is it, this statement of hers? And what’s more, she must know it. The women in Lives of the Wives, all…

Review Leon Russell: The Master of Space and Time's Journey Through Rock & Roll History By Bill JanovitzHachette, 592 pages, $31If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. A selective list of Leon Russell’s collaborators reads like a roll call of rock divinity: Jerry Lee Lewis, the Beach Boys, Ike and Tina Turner, the Rolling Stones, Joe Cocker, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Elton John. His debut album, released in 1970,…

As a 12-year-old child actor, Noël Coward featured in a dance number at the Savoy theatre in London playing the part of a mushroom. A photograph of him in his fungal finery – “grey silk skin tights, a large grey silk hat like a gargantuan muffin, and a diaphanous frill round my middle” – was put on display by his proud mother at whichever house the family were billeted in. It was perhaps the only picture in the son’s long career that he told his mother not to show when distinguished visitors called.The tension between…

Costume historians will doubtless look back on the day Karl Lagerfeld died in February 2019, leaving in his will lavish instructions for the ongoing care of his Birman cat Choupette, as the precise moment when the fun finally went out of high fashion. Yes, it’s possible another full-blown eccentric will one day preside over a big house. But it doesn’t feel, in the era of the global conglomerate, terribly likely. “Creation,” as Lagerfeld once put it, “is not a democratic process.” The more people (I may mean accountants)…

A biography focusing on the “turbulent private life” of crime writer John le Carré is to be published, illuminating “a hidden life of secrecy, passion and betrayal”, according to the book’s author Adam Sisman.The Secret Life of John le Carré is a follow-up to Sisman’s authorised 2015 biography, which was published by Bloomsbury.The new book will contain, said Sisman, information that he was “obliged to withhold” from the previous book when Le Carré was “very much alive and looking over my shoulder”. It is being published…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeOscar nominee Austin Butler still uses his 2007 IMDb biography that was written for him by his “proud parents”.Earlier this week, Riz Ahmed and Alison Williams announced the nominees for the 2023 Academy Awards, which will be held in March.Among the nominees is Butler for his role as Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann’s biopic Elvis.The 31-year-old actor recently received a Golden Globe…

At first glance there is something forcibly piteous about the title of Colin Grant’s book, I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be. It reads as though there is something inherently burdensome about being Black. It isn’t until you read the full quote – “I’m black so you can do all of those white things. I’m black so you don’t have to be” – which comes from his sometime mentor and “ribald philosopher” Uncle Castus, that you understand it is not meant as a display of martyrdom, but rather an insult. It’s a jab at the privileges of…

Will any literary character written this decade still be as famous in the 27th century as Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is today? The most memorable pilgrim from The Canterbury Tales, with her five husbands, her gap teeth and her big red hat, is still inspiring novels and plays, bars of soap and even organic cheeses (as one enterprising maker has it: “New Wyfe of Bath: now merrier and extra mature!”). She’s been translated by Voltaire, Dryden and Pope (who cut out the rude bits, leaving her prologue about half its original…