biography

By 1930, Lewis Mumford had given up. The radical philosopher-critic found his faith in historical progress – and human potential itself – crushed between the great war and the Great Depression. Salvation came from an unexpected source: the work of a then-obscure novelist of the previous century, Herman Melville.Melville had died 40 years before, his life uncommemorated, his writing dismissed by critics and forgotten by the reading public. Mumford, by contrast, was a rising star in America’s intellectual firmament, an…

There’s something irresistible if slightly solipsistic about researching your own ancestry. Thanks to digitised and searchable records, all the frustrating blanks in your family tree can now be enticingly fleshed out. Sometimes those blanks will reveal something remarkable and dramatic, but as any fan of BBC One’s Who Do You Think You Are? will attest, even the mundane tales can be strangely touching.Simon Mawer, Booker-shortlisted for The Glass Room in 2009, now enters this arena with his new novel (his word). Composed…

“I’m afraid I like strong contrasts,” Roald Dahl said, not long before his death in 1990. “I like villains to be terrible and good people to be very good.” Dahl himself gave a lie to that formulation. He is very easy to cast as a villain: even friends described him as bullying, overbearing, arrogant and impossible; he was a compulsive gambler, a distant and wayward husband, an unforgivable antisemite. But then, with the assistance of Quentin Blake, there are also the books. Tens of millions of children – myself included –…

What kind of barbarous creature was Harvey Weinstein, who punctuated business meetings by hurling marble ashtrays at the wall, ripped out a smoke alarm in a toilet on Concorde so he could enjoy a cigarette mid-Atlantic, ordered unsatisfactory employees to jump to their deaths from a high window, and regarded sexual abuse or rape as the equivalent of a job interview for young women anxious to appear in the movies he produced?In Ken Auletta’s meticulously reported account of his downfall, people assign Weinstein to one of…

Joyce Carol Oates has praised the new Netflix film adaptation of her Marilyn Monroe biography, Blonde.The film, directed by Andrew Dominik (Killing Them Softly), stars Ana de Armas (Knives Out) as the late screen icon.With months still to go until its release, Blonde has already made headlines for its adult content, with the director going as far as predicting the film will “offend everyone”.Speaking to Collider after seeing the film, Oates appeared to give the adaptation her seal of approval.“Andrew Dominik is a very…

Sanjeev Kumar continues to be an enigma. The Surat-born legendary actor and his choice of films, even today, can be studied for one to understand how performances and brilliant storylines can create history. Perhaps millennials remember him from Sholay, that film which makes their parents hark back to their younger selves, an age that they say was Golden. But films like Aandhi and Seeta Aur Geeta reveal a completely new side to him that undoubtedly made him a cut above the rest. On Saturday, his nephew Uday Jariwala and…

In his speech on the night of the invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, which Philip Short describes as “pulsating with anger and resentment” at 30 years of Russian humiliation, Putin seethed: “They deceived us… they duped us like a con artist… the whole so-called western bloc, formed by the United States in its own image is… an empire of lies.” For those who dismiss the speech and the invasion that followed as the words and actions of a man gone mad, dying or out of contact with reality due to Covid isolation, this new…

Inset of the cover to The Penultimate Truth.Image: Philip K. Dick EstatePhilip K. Dick is one of the most important and influential science fiction authors of all time, having written masterpieces like The Man in the High Castle, Ubik, A Scanner Darkly, and the novels that inspired the movies Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall, and more. Dick was also a very troubled man who suffered from drug abuse, hallucinations, a suicide attempt, and many other psychological ailments. Now the author’s tumultuous real life…

Volodymyr Zelenskiy is perhaps the closest thing to a mythical hero modern politics has to offer. Ukraine’s courageous wartime president captured the world’s imagination with his haunting, straight-to-camera monologues delivered under bombardment. A comic actor turned leader of the resistance, his story is a political fairytale. But is it almost too good to be true?Truth and fiction collide in the Ukrainian journalist Serhii Rudenko’s quirky and fascinating biography, describing how a man best known for playing a teacher…

Until 24 February this year, Volodymyr Zelenskiy was a name that was not widely known outside Ukraine. True, he’d enjoyed a cameo role in the impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump, when it appeared that the former American president had tried to pressure the new Ukrainian president into serving up dirt on Joe Biden’s son Hunter by allegedly blocking payment of a military aid package.But even then, he was just another leader of Ukraine, the largest entirely European nation, no more recognisable to the general populace…