24 June 2015

"100 Biographies to Love"

Last Sunday (June 21) the Culture supplement of the London Sunday Times published a special feature with the self-explanatory title, "100 biographies to love," that included the two by myself, Solzhenitsyn and Koestler. The list is "eclectic," to say the least, featuring books by or about Muhammad Ali, Patti Smith and Tina Fey, among others (autobiographies are included), but it also has many of my favorite works: Boswell, of course; AJA Symons's Quest for Corvo, Richard Holmes on Coleridge, Richard Ellman's Oscar Wilde, Judith Thurman's Life of Colette and Hermione Lee on Virginia Woolf, not to speak of Nabokov's Speak Memory and, surprisingly, Wordsworth's Prelude. It's well worth checking out for summer reading, which is the paper's intention, I think, and nice to be seen in such exalted company.