biography

If a cult writer’s aura endures long enough, their work might be elevated to Penguin Classics status. At leas, that’s what’s happened to Harry Crews, the author of many southern gothic novels populated by freaks and grotesques, including his most well-known novel, A Feast of Snakes. Born in Georgia in 1935, Crews died in 2012 and claimed to have sold only a few thousand books in hardback during his lifetime (a series of celebrity admirers including Sean Penn and Madonna failed to translate into mainstream popularity).…

In Sandip Ray’s 1988 documentary Zindagi Ek Safar, Rajesh Khanna recalls his first meeting with Kishore Kumar. The ace singer had called him to his place, where he listened to the actor talking and reacting to his questions for more than 30 minutes. Khanna later figured out that Kishore was studying his face, voice and style of speech so he could adapt their characteristics into his own voice. He was so successful at it that when Khanna first heard Mere Sapnon Ki Rani from Aradhana, he felt like he was singing it…

In Sandip Ray’s 1988 documentary Zindagi Ek Safar, Rajesh Khanna recalls his first meeting with Kishore Kumar. The ace singer had called him to his place, where he listened to the actor talking and reacting to his questions for more than 30 minutes. Khanna later figured out that Kishore was studying his face, voice and style of speech so he could adapt their characteristics into his own voice. He was so successful at it that when Khanna first heard Mere Sapnon Ki Rani from Aradhana, he felt like he was singing it…

Norman Mailer – when not boozily brawling, dosing himself with hallucinogenic drugs and serially fornicating – was a man with a sacred mission. He regarded himself as a prophet, bringing bad news to a society that had settled into consumerist complacency during the 1950s. Americans believe that they live in God’s own country; Mailer alerted them to “the possible existence of Satan”, who might be residing next door and quietly assembling a private arsenal for use on Judgment Day. Although Mailer looked up at the sky with…

It’s the job of a satirist to identify their subjects by their works – “By their fruits shall ye know them” is our sustaining text from Saint Matthew – justifying the monstrous portrayal of our political masters because of their serial screw-ups. But how then should we judge satirists? Often their works are taken at face value, assumed to be advocating what they are, in fact, satirising. Judgment is, therefore, frequently harsh. In 1703 Daniel Defoe was sentenced to be pilloried after his satirical pamphlet The Shortest…

A century ago, a man with a double life published one of the most celebrated, anthologised and dissected poems in English literature. TS Eliot spent six days a week at the offices of Lloyds bank and crammed the business of poetry and literary criticism into the evenings and Sundays. This allowed him to write The Waste Land, a densely allusive work that drew on Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, Jacobean tragedy, tarot and the Upanishads to create a dazzling portrait of both the ruins of postwar Europe and the inner alienation of…

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The voices in her head told Hilma af Klint she would be a great artist. They weren’t wrong. Born in 1862, she was unusual from an early age. Growing up in austere Lutheran Sweden, Af Klint studied art at university: a rare feat for a woman. Even less common was her insistence on practising as a professional after graduation. In the face of a society – and an art world – riddled with extreme misogyny, a quiet, conventional career in portraiture seemed the best she could hope for. But then, as Julia Voss reveals in her new…

Famously, she was the first British prime minister to be outlasted by a lettuce.More pertinently for the book industry, however, Liz Truss was also the first to unravel almost faster than a biographer can type. She quit eight days before the Sun’s political editor Harry Cole and Spectator diarist James Heale were due to deliver a portrait already being written at breakneck speed, and for a book to emerge at all in the circumstances arguably represents something of a heroic technical achievement. True, the writing is…

Hunting Ghislaine sounds aggressively anachronistic, given that we know exactly where the woman is: she’s serving 20 years for child sex trafficking in a US federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida. The book’s title stems from a well-received podcast of the same name that my former Observer colleague, the inimitable John Sweeney, produced a couple of years ago.The research from that endeavour informs much of this work. The question is, though, is there anything about the wretched Maxwell that we don’t already know? After…