Biography & Memoir

The Act of Persuasion

The drama of Elizabeth Hardwick’s life emanated from an elemental restlessness and a desire for sovereignty over her intellect and emotion.

April 21, 2022 issue

Simon Callow

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Pianist

Jeremy Denk’s memoir is not just about piano lessons but about life lessons—how the artist creates a self.

April 21, 2022 issue

Michael Gorra

Being Dickens

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s The Turning Point minutely conveys the texture of Charles Dickens’s daily life over the course of a year when he was at the peak of his powers.

April 21, 2022 issue

Benjamin Nathans

Bureaucrat’s Honor

Three memoirs by Trump administration officials reveal the integrity and moral discipline of the so-called deep state in the face of corruption and philistinism.

April 21, 2022 issue

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

An Unexpectedly Modern Monarch

Despite his mundane outlook and stiff conventionality, George V may have ensured the survival of the British monarchy in a turbulent century.

April 7, 2022 issue

Colin B. Bailey

A Compulsive Perfectionist

The intensely private Edgar Degas reveals himself intermittently in his voluminous correspondence, in moments of unexpected self-awareness and candor.

April 7, 2022 issue

Clair Wills

Letters from a Scattered Place

John McGahern’s plain prose hides a pileup of cruelties and injustices.

April 7, 2022 issue

Roya Hakakian

The Refugee’s Internal Exile

Our family had to flee Iran after 1979 and settle in the US, but in his imagination my father never left. Only I, by burying him here, have put down roots that he lost.

March 20, 2022

The Latest

Yuri Slezkine

‘He Loved Handing Out Decorations’

The admiring biographer of Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet Union’s most memorably inconspicuous leader, finds him an affable heartthrob who longed for peace “with every fibre of his body.”

June 9, 2022 issue

Gavin Francis

The Babel Within

Two memoirs consider what’s gained and lost when a new language is acquired and a mother tongue is all but forgotten.

May 26, 2022 issue

Christopher Benfey

The Hum of Humanity

The autobiographical turn in Stanley Cavell’s later work illuminates his extraordinarily varied philosophical interests.

May 12, 2022 issue

Regina Marler

The Bucolic Heroic

Catherine Hewitt’s Art Is a Tyrant is a full depiction of the nineteenth-century painter Rosa Bonheur’s unconventional life.

May 12, 2022 issue

Brian Seibert

Never the Same Step Twice

Where the previous generation of dancers arranged their steps into tidy, regular phrases, John Bubbles enjambed over the bar lines, multiplying, twisting, tilting, turning.

May 12, 2022 issue

Gary Saul Morson

What Solzhenitsyn Understood

Detecting the same incompetence and self-satisfaction among the liberals of the Provisional Government in 1917 and the reformers of the post-Soviet era in the 1990s, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn feared another descent into authoritarian rule.

May 12, 2022 issue

Fintan O’Toole

The Last of Her Kind

Angela Merkel emerged from the ruins of the Eastern bloc as a spectacular example of the way the collapse of an old regime might create a much more benign sense of opportunity.

April 7, 2022 issue

Madeleine Schwartz

Bike Lane to the Élysée

The environmentalist policies of Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist mayor of Paris, have transformed the capital. Why is her presidential campaign faltering?

March 24, 2022 issue

Jenny Uglow

A Master of Ambiguity

Hans Holbein evoked his subjects with uncanny verisimilitude, but leaves us to guess at his opinions of them.

March 24, 2022 issue

Jed Perl

Proud of His Conundrums

The midcentury art critic Harold Rosenberg skewered his fellow New York intellectuals as a “herd of independent minds,” but his own work has more striking provocations than deep conclusions.

March 24, 2022 issue