Two biographies of Alexander McQueen, a new Robert Macfarlane, AA Gill’s memoir of alcoholism… Rachel Cooke finds plenty to excite
Three years ago, a well-known literary agent told me that biography was on the way out. Sales were down, he said, and advances with them, and in the near future, he believed they would be written hardly at all. I remember flinching at this doom-laden announcement: I was about to start work on my own (group) biography. But I also felt in my marrow that he was wrong. And so it has proved. Not only is a younger generation reinventing the form (think of H Is for Hawk, in which Helen Macdonald combines memoir and nature writing with an account of the life of TH White). Even traditional biographies – the kind that begin at the beginning and end at the end – continue to be published and, in some cases, to rack up sales and prize nominations.
The new year will bring new biographies of, among many others, TS Eliot (by Robert Crawford, who will focus on the young poet; Jonathan Cape, February), Saul Bellow (by Zachary Leader; Jonathan Cape, May) and John le Carré (by Adam Sisman; Bloomsbury, October), though the one I’m looking forward to most is Mr and Mrs Disraeli: A Strange Romance, Daisy Hay’s book about the Victorian prime minister’s eccentric and surprisingly modern marriage (Bloomsbury, January). I also like the sound both of A Curious Friendship: The Story of a Bluestocking and a Bright Young Thing by Anna Thomasson, an account of the unlikely relationship between the writer Edith Oliver and the artist Rex Whistler (Macmillan, March) and of Threads: The Delicate Life of John Craske by Julia Blackburn (Jonathan Cape, April).
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