Biographies

Read all the latest reviews from New Statesman writers of biographies and memoirs.

Also featuring Anna Metcalfe’s Chrysalis and Octavia Bright’s This Ragged Grace.

By Megan Gibson, Ellen Peirson-Hagger, Matthew Gilley and Michael Prodger

The writer has become a national treasure, moral arbiter and begetter of biographies: do we need a new one?

By Robert Colls

Joanna Biggs’ A Life of One’s Own looks to the letters and journals of literary women for guidance. Can they…

By Anna Leszkiewicz

Men at War, Luke Turner’s tender account of servicemen’s transgressive private lives, transforms our understanding of the Second World War.

By Erica Wagner

Brilliant and eccentric, the Oxford philosopher spent his career grappling with fundamental moral questions.

By David Edmonds

Also featuring Eve by Claire Horn and A Stranger in Your Own City by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad.

By Harry Clarke-Ezzidio, India Bourke, Ellen Peirson-Hagger and Michael Prodger

In her work, the novelist developed a radical philosophy of relationships. In her life, she put it into practice.

By Anna Leszkiewicz

A new biography shows how he began life as a revolutionary and ended it hosting the Queen Mother.

By Tanya Gold