Embroidering Her Truth: Mary, Queen of Scots and the Language of Power

Banner-maker, community artist and textile curator, Clare Hunter won the Saltire First Book Award for her debut work, Threads of Life (2019), which became Waterstone’s Scottish Book of the Month and a Radio 4 Book of the Week. Embroidering Her Truth continues this historical thread, weaving readers through episodes in Mary Stuart’s life, with an intricate examination of embroideries, tapestries, and textiles, and the subliminal messages these held.

Rosa Branson: a portrait

Lynn Michell (Linen Press, 2020); Pbk £9.99 Writer and publisher, Lynn Michell’s published work spans over 30 years. Michell has produced works of fiction, non-fiction, text books and poetry, much of her work being shortlisted for literary awards. This is her first biography. Its subject, the artist Rosa Branson, was born in 1933 and is Read More

Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years (Shortlisted, 2016 Costa Biography Award)

Any number of books and histories have been written about Queen Elizabeth and her reign. Several well-received films about her which have also explored aspects of her reign. So you might be forgiven in thinking John Guy is re-covering a well-researched topic. He explains what sets Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years apart when he declares, “I Read More

The Blue Touch Paper

“I had at the end of 1968 become literary manager of the Royal Court Theatre.  This had happened largely by accident.”  This kind of lucky accident often happened to playwright and director David Hare, who in a poll in 2000 by the National Theatre, had five plays selected in the top 100 and was 10th Read More

The Invention of Nature (Winner of the 2015 Costa Biography Award)

In her grand work, The Invention of Nature, Andrea Wulf sets out to restore Alexander von Humboldt (b. 1769) to his rightful place in the pantheon of scientific greats.  By introducing  the worldview that “nature is a living whole”, a “web of life”, and that man – through deforestation, farming and industrial practices – was Read More

Gilliamesque: A Pre-Posthumous Memoir

Despite Variety’s recent claims of his demise, Terry Gilliam is yet at large. As the cartoonist turned filmmaker’s 75th birthday approaches, he shows no sign of slowing down. Having spent the greater part of this year hopping continents in a whirlwind of publicity, taking his 2014 feature, The Zero Theorem, to Europe, touring with his Read More

Young Eliot: From St Louis to The Waste Land

Robert Crawford’s biography is probably the best account so far of how The Waste Land came to be written, and what resources it drew upon. This is not to treat the poem teleologically, as though Eliot had always been working towards it. Rather, the biography simply acknowledges (not least by its subtitle) that Eliot would Read More