Collection: Biographies

'I was born in 1939. The other big event of that year was the outbreak of the Second World War, but for the moment, that did not affect me.' In the first installment of Clive James's memoirs, we meet the young Clive, dressed in short trousers, and wrestling with the demands of school, various rel...

This is the first of Maya Angelou's five volumes of autobiography, in which she evokes her childhood with her grandmother in the American south of the 1930s. She learns the power of a white skin and suffers the trauma of rape by her mother's lover.

With the moral stamina and intellectual pose of a twentieth-century Titan, this slightly built, duitful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose. He was prof...