How not to read JG Ballard
This new biography has done a great writer a disservice
ByBiographies
Read all the latest reviews from New Statesman writers of biographies and memoirs.
Jan Morris’s defiant life
The transgender travel writer was both temperamentally conservative and deeply unconventional
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Gwendoline Riley is haunted by herself
The author’s new novel, Palm House, lacks her usual virtuosity
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We must love WH Auden or die
The poet was a restless spirit, haunted by his own Englishness
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The rise of British Muslims
What do two politicians’ memoirs reveal about the changing fortunes of British Muslims in public life?
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Melvyn Bragg’s class act
Was his success “social mobility”, or just good luck?
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Inside the mind of Luigi Mangione
A biography of the man on trial for anti-corporate murder seeks to disrupt the hero narrative that has grown around…
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Tupac Shakur: lion or loser?
The mythologised rapper was a natural shapeshifter – who no one ever truly got to know
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How Richard Holmes humanised Tennyson
The biographer of England’s great poets reveals the secrets of inhabiting his subjects’ lives
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Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary is a fierce chronicle of self-invention
The novelist and activist details how she fashioned herself out of collisions with her mother
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Constantine Cavafy’s melancholy and majesty
The 20th-century Greek-Alexandrian poet wrote of a faded grandeur that stood for all humanity.
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Robert Louis Stevenson’s adventures in storytelling
A new biography reveals the author as shaped by conflicting influences – and affirms his status as a serious writer.
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Asa Briggs, professor of everything
The historian and educator’s achievements were as long and varied as his contacts book.
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Samuel Pepys’s diary of a somebody
Kate Loveman’s history of a national treasure preserves Pepys’s charm while revealing a discomfiting historical world.
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Xi Jinping’s daddy issues
The Chinese president’s concept of power was forged by the suffering of his revolutionary father, Xi Zhongxun.
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Jacinda Ardern’s unexamined life
In her memoir, the former prime minister seems more concerned with the symbols of politics than the actual politics the prompted…
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Giorgia Meloni’s selective memory
The Italian prime minister’s autobiography revises her and her country’s history. But Meloni’s success is a template for right populist…
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Martha Wainwright, in her own right
The musician’s career has been helped and hampered by her famous name – and her live shows embody her struggle…
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The ghost of Muriel Spark
In her work and life the writer was obsessed with biography – but when she authorised her own she loathed…
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Gertrude Stein’s quest for fame
The modernist phenomenon believed bad attention was better than none at all.
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