Essie fox

John P. Murphy New Deal Art 336pp. Thames and Hudson. Paperback, £19.99. Seymour Fogel’s “Wealth of the Nation”, installed in 1942 in a federal building in Washington DC, depicts a group of workers en

Sibyls , the book born of Ruth Fainlight’s poems and Leonard Baskin’s prints, became a memento of friendship, beauty and sorrow for its author

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.

“Where are we to begin?”, Virginia Woolf asks in her essay “How to Read a Book”. “How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasures from what we read?

“This tremendous aggregate of a book has many of the characteristics of a Festschrift assembled to honour some Great Influencer”: so, in 1973, the architectural historian Priscilla Metcalf began the f

THE MARK OF A GREAT, TOUGH BOOK MAY NOT be how many literature classes it’s taught in but how many film or TV adaptations you can drape on its branches without breaking them. Dramatizations are tricky