Nigel Jones, a chastened practitioner of writing biographies, warns that writing someone’s life can be a dangerous venture

Highsmith was a great writer, with a moral vision bracing enough to clarify the terrors of the twentieth century

You will search in vain for a new life of any rocker who made his name after the advent of punk

Would I read it if the subject wasn’t famous? One has to say yes, with chips and curry sauce

The author is evenhanded and accurate about the nouvelle cuisine movement, says Paul Levy

This is perhaps the only book I have yet read about Amin which gives anything like an accurate assessment of who he was

The 20th-anniversary edition of Douglas Murray’s Bosie remains the seminal account of the tragic life of Lord Alfred Douglas

Dominic Hilton discovers the extraordinary life and times of “Gaucho Laird”, R.B. Cunninghame Graham

Joseph Connolly treasures his friendship with his literary hero

Tom Chesshyre recounts Dickens’s troubled history with trains