Biography

If any book market is nearing saturation, it must be the Nietzsche one, yet new titles keep appearing. Julian Young’s biography, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, is unusual, given the author’s academic repute as a Nietzsche scholar. Young acutely surveys Nietzsche’s life, while offering erudite accounts of his philosophy. As Young observes in explaining Nietzsche’s own self-referential style, ‘biographies sweeten the hard-to-swallow pill of philosophy’, and this is also true of Young’s book. Moreover, while Young clearly loves Nietzsche, this book is not written in the sycophantic style that is common of the genre (Nietzsche’s philosophy is criticised in many places, as is Nietzsche himself).

In retrospect, it seems hard to explain the widespread influence of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. When he died at the age of one hundred in 2009, the New York Times said in its obituary that he was ‘the French anthropologist whose revolutionary studies of what was once called “primitive man” transformed Western understanding of the nature of culture, custom and civilization’. It was a typically inflated assessment. Not so Patrick Wilcken’s excellent biography of Lévi-Strauss, which brings into sharp focus the extremely idiosyncratic nature of his oeuvre, while at the same time showing how it managed to catch a post-World War II Modernist wave of popularity. When the intellectual surf rolled out again later in the century, Lévi-Strauss was left standing alone, but by then that was exactly how he liked it.

In September 1857, after twenty-one years of marriage, Charles Dickens began the eight-month long process of separating himself from his wife, Catherine. At forty-two years of age, Catherine had given birth to ten children and managed Dickens’s large household. Until the mid 1850s she and Dickens seemed to enjoy a happy partnership, yet by 1858 Catherine was exiled from the family home and cut off from all but one of her children.

Some locations are perfect for reading particular books; those that foster an extra connection to history as lived by the protagonists. Now that the labyrinthine corridors of Old Parliament House have been opened to all, climb the rickety staircase to the press gallery, Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt’s book in hand, to reach the cramped den of power of their vulpine subject. Among the evocatively recreated rooms and the very pipework of the building that, we learn, literally leakedthe scoops from the House of Representatives below, the cigarette-addled voice of ‘The Red Fox’ still crackles out alongside the recorded clang of typed keys. Alan Reid, journalist, author, and political communications spin doctor before the term was even invented, died the year prior to Parliament’s move up the hill. But the old building’s new title as ‘The Museum of Democracy’ fittingly stamps the need to focus attention back on one wily fox, who ran free but unelected at the heart of the democratic process, and who has until now escaped scholarly assessment.

In October 2010 Hugh Brady, president of University College Dublin, sent colleagues around the world a copy of The Idea of a University(1854)by Cardinal John Henry Newman. As Newman approached beatification, President Brady recalled that UCD is the successor institution to the Catholic University of Ireland, which welcomed Newman as its first rector in 1851. Not many university leaders can aspire to sainthood, but establishing a new university and writing a classic text about the purpose of higher learning were only brief episodes in the long life of the most famous church intellectual of the nineteenth century.

Mansfield was thirty-four. Having suffered tuberculosis for years, she died after hurrying up some stairs, intending to show her husband how well she was. This was at La Prieuré, Fontainebleau, house of George Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man: a sort of commune, organised around shamanic dancing, Eastern mysticism, and Gurdjieff’s compelling personality. For Mansfield, the Institute was not simply a last resort; she went there for a new beginning. In a letter to her friend Koteliansky, she wrote: ‘I mean to change my whole way of life entirely …’

On those twin Titans of the twentieth-century English stage, John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, fellow-actor Simon Callow recently reflected: ‘We tell stories about them … because they filtered life through the medium of their souls to create new and rich variations on the human condition: they lived their art to the fullest extent possible. Of whom shall we be telling stories now?’

Jim McNeil was a two-bit thug. A liar, a thief, a recurrent wife-beater and bully, probably a murderer, definitely a racist, he was a man in whom psychotic rage was seldom remote. Contradictions were elemental to his character: he was intelligent and charismatic, yet obdurate and ratty. Violence and menace defined him, but he was at heart a coward. He meticulously planned armed robberies, but frequently bungled their execution. He was nicknamed ‘The Laughing Bandit’, but his smiling demeanour was born of contempt for the people he traumatised and of disbelief at the ease with which he could snatch wealth. As the subtitle of Ross Honeywill’s aptly named biography makes clear, McNeil was also a playwright of subtle instinct and luminous talent. His is a Jekyll–Hyde conundrum well worth this contemplation.