Biography: literary

Here is an engrossing biography of the man whose writings about 1930s Berlin made him famous. Christopher Isherwood rejected the life he was born to and set out to make a different one. Heir to an English estate, he flunked out of university, moved to Berlin, was driven through Europe by the Nazi...

Doomed survivor of a family of geniuses, Charlotte Brontë had a life as dramatic as Jane Eyre. Turning her back on her tragic past, she reinvented herself as an acclaimed writer, a mysterious celebrity, and a lover. Doing so meant burning many bridges, but her sudden death left her friends and a...

Paul Foot was one of the most powerful and influential investigative reporters of his generation. For nearly 50 years he was the scourge of corrupt politicians and dodgy businessmen, and the champion of the causes of working people, the under-represented and the underprivileged. In this biography...

Secrecy came naturally to John le Carré, and there were some secrets that he fought fiercely to keep. Nowhere was this more so than in his private life. Apparently content in his marriage, the novelist conducted a string of love affairs over four decades. To keep these relationships secret, he m...

'Straight Acting' is a surprising portrait of Shakespeare's queer lives - his own and those in his plays and poems. It is a journey back in time and through Shakespeare's England, revealing a culture that both endorsed and supressed same-sex desire. It is a call to stop making Shakespeare act str...

'Thom Gunn' is a landmark study of one of England and America's most innovative and revolutionary poets. Michael Nott chronicles Gunn's largely undocumented life: his childhood in Kent and London, his mother's suicide, and his mind-opening education at Cambridge, where he read Shakespeare and Joh...

Today, Ker-Seymer's photographs are known for who they represent, rather than the face behind the camera. This irony is underpinned by the misattribution of some of her most daring and innovative images, to Cecil Beaton. This biography restores Ker-Seymer to her rightful position as an artist at ...