A biography is a daunting task for any writer. How can you summarise a life? Can you realistically cover all of the source material? If the subject is well known, there are probably rival biographies.

My fresher’s year at Edinburgh University offered a few rude awakenings. The first: learning the university had run out of self-catered accommodation. The next was that the uni’s solution was to have

Gerald Howard’s The Insider is a crowded but colourful portrait of Malcolm Cowley, poet, editor and chronicler of the so-called Lost Generation – those American exemplars of literary modernism who, li

Jamaica Kincaid Putting Myself Together Writing 1974-336pp. Picador. £20. Born in Antigua in 1949, Jamaica Kincaid spent her first years in the United States as a teenage servant (her word, “au pairs”

JESSE JACKSON WAS ENROLLED AT THE Chicago Theological Seminary in 1965 when he decided to join other like-minded students in traveling to Selma, Ala., where Martin Luther King Jr. was leading a march

In 1966, an essay far ahead of its time appeared in the pages of the New Left Review (NLR). “Women: The Longest Revolution” was an analysis of how women are produced as a class. Its author, Juliet Mit