Somerset Maugham’s brilliant biography
Like George Orwell, Henry James and other untrusting souls, W. Somerset Maugham wanted no biography; but unlike them, he provided a lesson in the odium which an indiscreet account of a life can bring...
View Article“My Father’s Fortune”: Memoir of a sneering youth
With "My Father's Fortune: A Life," playwright, novelist, translator, journalist and screenwriter Michael Frayn adds memoirist to his attributes. Is this inspired mischief maker constitutionally suited...
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“Doc”: A cutthroat legend comes alive
Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, and Earp's many brothers are known to most of us as they have been shaped successively by sensationalist journalism, dime novels, movies, and TV series. Though...
View Article“Reveille in Washington”: The city that shaped the Civil War
This year, as you know, marks the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War. Setting aside the brutal, drawn-out war waged against Native Americans, it was the most destructive conflict in...
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“Flashback”: Imagining Obama’s apocalyptic American future
Dan Simmons, for years familiar to fans of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, made his way to the general reader with two historical/horror hybrids. "The Terror," published in 2007, was an...
View Article“A Book of Secrets”: A biographical trilogy concludes
Michael Holroyd sees the biographer's art, his art, as combining the discipline and factual concreteness of history with the creativity and psychological insight of the novel. What is more, and most...
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Witnesses to the end of white African sovereighty
Alexandra Fuller's 2001 memoir, "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight," was a funny, moving, tragedy-strewn account of growing up in a white settler family in Rhodesia, later Zimbabwe, and of her...
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