Brilliant biographies

[EffiePerine]

Currently reading the biog of Wilfred Thesiger: good but not immensely so, relies a LOT on quotation, which I guess is a big problem for any biography of a good writer. I do enjoy a good biography (or autobiography), so any suggestions?

Oxford DNB : more brief lives of dead people than you can shake a stick at

I was going to suggest The Dirt in my first post but didn't want to lower the tone. I never even liked Motley Crue but the book is pretty jaw dropping.

Im reading this at the moment..........
www.amazon.co.uk/Sun-Water-Brilliant-Tragic-MacColl/dp/1844545490/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=124 3286098&sr=1-1

Very sad but an interesting look at Kirsties life!!

y'see I would never have thought of some of these - Thr Dirt sounds most intriguing

Have you read Jennifer Worth's Call the Midwife?

The best music biography I remember reading was an intelligent, feminist one of Janis Joplin that looked like it had been researched and footnoted as meticulously as an academic work. I've flicked through the Danny Sugarman books and they do look to be quite a good read. Music books are often rather disappointing and some are just very tacky.

I like memoirs of people who aren't especially famous but have an interesting story to tell - favourites when I was young included Esther Hautzig's the Endless Steppe about a family deported to Siberia during the Second World War (as they were Polish Jews it probably saved their lives albeit in a fairly harsh sort of way), and Ilse Koehn's Mischling Second Degree about a girl in Nazi Germany who had one Jewish parent and her non-Jewish grandparents enrolled her in the Hitler Youth and hid her background.

I have lots of fascinating looking biographies which I'm intending to read but haven't got there yet - a dramatisation of Mrs Beeton's life convinced me that her biography wasn't the best book to read when pregnant (twice with a year in between) or suffering from postnatal depression as she lost a lot of babies in childbirth and one as a toddler, before dying in childbirth herself in her 20s.

I second The Mitford Girls by Mary Lovell, also the biography of Diana Mosley (nee Mitford) by Anne de Courcy is very good. Also Katharine Remembered about Katharine Hepburn by A Scott Berg is excellent, he was a close friend of hers for years and is a very personal and moving biography.

Ricky Tomlinson's autobiog is really good, far better than I expected, he was a political prisoner in the 70s, so it't not all 'my arse'.

Matthew Parris's Chance Witness is brilliant. Really well written and fascinating about his childhood in Zimbabwe.

Rupert Everett's Red Carpet's and Other Banana Skins (terrible name for an autobiog but still) is a scream, really very funny and again, well written imo.

Nigel Slater's Toast. It's just a perfect book that I didn't want to end.

Also, goes without saying, Alan Bennet's Untold Stories and Writing Home.

Was just about to recommend Alan Bennett's Writing Home! (found Untold Stories less good, too many churches and name-dropping after the initial stuff about his family.)

I always recommend Sheila Hancock's "The Two Of Us", about her life growing up and her relationship with John Thaw. It's a beautiful book.

I also really enjoyed "Margrave of the Marshes" by John Peel.

"Good Wives?" by Margaret Forster is an interesting book, too. In it she compares the lives of Mary Livingstone (married to Dr David Livingstone, the explorer), Fanny Stevenson (married to Robert Louis Stevenson), and Jennie Lee, the MP who married Aneurin Bevan. She then contrasts those women's lives with her own. It's a thought-provoking and fantastically well-written book that shows how the expectations of women's lives and the obligations placed upon them have changed over the years.

Snorbs - Good Wives sounds fascinating, I will look out for it, ditto the Sheila Hancock one, she seems like an interesting woman in interviews.

good wives is a fab book

Julie Kavanagh's biog of Nureyev: so wellwritten (she makes you see the dancing somehow) and the most amazing life to boot.

I also loved Selina Hastings' biog of Rosamund Lehmann

On the autobiog front, Elizabeth Jane Howard's slipstream, The Smoking Diaries by Simon Gray, and Paula Fox's Borrowed Finery

With Nails: the film diaries of Richard E Grant very good indeed (sort of qualifies!)

The Kenneth Williams Diaries: very sad and totally at odds with his public persona (like most comics)

Nella's last war: the 2nd world war diaries of Housewife 49: was made into a drama with Victoria Wood but is a wonderful read.

Easy Riders: Raging Bulls - a brilliant bio of the Hollywood excesses of Dennis Hopper et al.

Falling Leaves - the story of an unwanted Chinese daughter - Adeline Yen Mah: another very evocative auto-bio. (Along the same lines is Wild Swans by Jung Chang)

God I love bios/memoires and could recommend loads more although I must admit a particular interest in 'old' Hollywood and stars and 'darker' characters or periods of history.

Bob Geldof - Is that it?
Brilliant.

Boy George - Take it Like A Man. Very funny.

Mercury and Me By Jim Hutton is very, very sad

i liked bob's book too.

love long time gone by david crosby, but interested in that time

Selina Hastings biography of Rosamund Lehmann is good fun - you don't have to have read her books to enjoy it she was such a fruit loop!

Also I loved Simon Callow's biog of Orson Wells.

Probably out of print, Richard Buckle's biography of Diaghilev too. Again an amazing man - you don't have to be a ballet fan.

On the rock theme I loved Anthony Kiedis' (Red Hot Chillis) autobiog. Scar Tissue.

definitely scar tissue

John Sergeant

Boris Johnson - Lend Me Your Ears (sort of bio)

I really liked Dirk Bogardes biographies, especially the early ones about his child hood.

scar tissue is brilliant, very funny in places.
slash one is very good too.
quite enjoyed marilyn mansons' one as well, very interesting man.