biography
Laura Beatty: Looking for Theophrastus review - adventures in psychobiographyFriday, 06 May 2022
Laura Beatty is a kind of Shirley Valentine figure in contemporary English literature. A decade and a half ago she published an astonishing debut novel entitled Pollard about female emancipation from the strictures of English life. In that story her... Read more... |
Broken Wings, Charing Cross Theatre review - new musical fails to flyWednesday, 16 February 2022
Somewhere in the world right now, one can hear Mister Mister's AOR hit, "Broken Wings" on an MOR radio station, capturing mid-Eighties synth pop perfectly. Few listeners will know that its inspiration is a 1912 autobiographical novel by Lebanese-... Read more... |
Belfast review - coming of age amid the terror of the TroublesTuesday, 01 February 2022
For all his achievements as actor and director, Kenneth Branagh isn’t immediately thought of as a screenwriter, despite his multiple Shakespeare adaptations. That may all change with Belfast, because Branagh’s deeply personal account (he’s both... Read more... |
Long Promised Road review - another attempt to probe the fragile genius of Brian WilsonSaturday, 22 January 2022
There has been no shortage of documentaries about king Beach Boy Brian Wilson, not to mention the 2014 bio-drama Love & Mercy, so the purpose of this new effort by director Brent Wilson (no relation) isn’t altogether clear. Certainly Wilson (the... Read more... |
Ananyo Bhattacharya: The Man from the Future review - the man, the maths, the brainTuesday, 05 October 2021
Suppose I’m a novelist plotting a panoramic narrative through world-shaping moments of the first half of the 20th century. I’ll need a character who can visit a bunch of key sites. Göttingen in the 1920s, where the essentials of quantum mechanics... Read more... |
Oliver Sacks: His Own Life review - a complex portrait of a complex manMonday, 27 September 2021
It’s well worth tracking down one of the September 29 special cinema screenings of Ric Burns' lovingly made documentary portrait of the writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks, or seeking it out online. Famous for his vivid, insightful descriptions of... Read more... |
Frances Larson: Undreamed Shores review - journeys without mapsTuesday, 02 March 2021
Beatrice Blackwood had lived in a clifftop village between surf and jungle on Bougainville Island, part of the Solomon archipelago in the South Pacific. She hunted, fished and grew crops with local people as she studied their social and sexual lives... Read more... |
Jackie Kay: Bessie Smith review – vivid writing about the Empress of the BluesThursday, 18 February 2021
Blues singer Bessie Smith (1894-1937) had much more than an astonishingly powerful voice. It may already be almost a hundred years since she made her most significant recordings – she is from an era before amplification – and yet her unfailing... Read more... |
One Night in Miami review - black history come aliveWednesday, 13 January 2021
In 1964, Cassius Clay, NFL superstar Jim Nathaniel Brown, soul legend Sam Cooke and political firebrand Malcolm X gathered for one night in a dingy room at the Hampton Motel. It was a meeting that became a symbol of hope for black Americans. A photo... Read more... |
Mank review – David Fincher’s brilliant, bitter-sweet paean to Hollywood’s Golden AgeWednesday, 02 December 2020
For so much of the year, Tenet was cited as the film that was going to save cinema – the tentpole extravaganza that would draw virus-conscious punters back to the big screen. The assertion was always fanciful, the pandemic being too long a... Read more... |
William Feaver: The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame 1968-2011 review - mesmerising, exhaustive and obsessively detailedSunday, 13 September 2020
This is a biography like no other, more or less dictated by Lucian Freud. William Feaver spoke with the artist perhaps almost daily for nearly 40 years, visiting frequently, taking notes, recording, and being shown work in progress. The second... Read more... |
Vincent van Gogh: the reader and the writerSunday, 26 July 2020
A life in art, a life in looking; a life in writing, a life in reading; a life fuelled by passionate emotions, personal attachments and religious turmoil. There are a few artists whose lives are so intertwined with their work that their biography as... Read more... |
