Biography

Sean Connery & Murray Grigor - Being a Scot

4 Sep 2008

Many Scots cynics, upon seeing the title of this new coffee table volume by our most famous actor, might be inspired to enquire just how much research on the subject can be done by an ex-pat who hasn't lived in the country for decades. It's an…

Derren Brown - Tricks of the Mind

Derren Brown

7 Dec 2006

BIOGRAPHY/MANUAL What’s the first rule among magicians? Surely it’s the one about never ever divulging the secrets of your chosen profession. So, what on earth is Derren Brown doing here telling the humble general public how to develop useful…

Books on cinema - round-up

How the Movie Brats Took Over Edinburgh, Tough Without A Gun, The Faber Book of French Cinema

23 May 2011

As is always the way in Scotland, summer is kind of here, and now is the time to lie in the grass with that growing pile of tosh novels. But let’s face it, you are going to win a lot more kudos from your film-obsessed mates if you create a tower of…

New music books: Luke Haines - Post Everything, Andy Kershaw - No Off Switch,

Simon Reynold - Retromania, Scott Weiland - Not Dead & Not for Sale

23 May 2011

Semi-absent fans of former Auteur and Black Box Recorder man Luke Haines might have received something of a jolt on suddenly Googling him. The words on the second entry would have immediately caught the eye: ‘It is with deep regret that we have to…

Yunte Huang - Charlie Chan

27 Oct 2010

(WW Norton) Chinese-American academic Yunte Huang’s biography of the popular Oriental sleuth, star of six bestselling novels published from the mid-1920s on and upwards of 50 Hollywood films that followed, proves to be a pretty solid piece of…

The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi by Andrew McConnell Scott

15 Oct 2009

This sprightly biography of Britain’s most famous clown is inevitably prefaced by the Grimaldi family tree. This is a particularly handy illustration, given the Olympic appetite of his father, ‘the Signor’ – a true bastard it seems – for copulation.

Falling and Laughing: The Restoration of Edwyn Collins

9 Jul 2009

‘I witter on like a budgie, as my mum would say.’ Lanarkshire-born writer Grace Maxwell is chuckling as she talks about Falling and Laughing, her story of partner Edwyn Collins’ miraculous rehabilitation from two devastating brain haemorrhages in 2005.

Scotland The Great - Robert Crawford: The Bard

22 Jan 2009

‘One of my friends said to me that a new biography of Burns is the least necessary book in the world, but actually quite a lot of the previous biographies aren’t up to scratch, either because they aren’t all that well written or they didn’t have much…

Martin Greig - The Zen of Naka

11 Dec 2008

SPORTS BIOGRAPHY Timing is everything when it comes to sport biogs. As Celtic tumble out of Europe in a flurry of missed opportunities, and with rumours rife that Shunsuke Nakamura may part company with the club in January, it seems Martin Greig’s…

Also Published - 5 Biographies

16 Oct 2008

Susie Boyt - My Judy Garland Life The daughter of Lucien Freud embarks on a journey following in her showbiz idol’s footsteps to discover what her life could teach us about love, loss and fame. Virago. Jonathan Bate - Soul of the Age This one…

Art Spiegelman - Breakdowns

18 Sep 2008

BIOGRAPHY Subtitled ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@*!’, this was the first collected book of comic art which the Jewish-American Spiegelman had published. Created between 1972 and 1977, the volume is reissued with an illustrated 20-page…

Mark Evanier - Kirby: King of Comics

3 Jul 2008

BIOG (Abrams) As befits a book about the man who reinvented comics with the most dynamic artwork the medium had ever seen, friend and colleague Mark Evanier’s biography/critical commentary is a large format coffee table hardback full of big and…

Bob Levin - Most Outrageous

3 Jul 2008

NON-FICTION/BIOG (Fantagraphics) Looking for a suitable subject for the follow-up to his book The Pirates and the Mouse – a wickedly funny account of a gang of comic book creators who satirised themselves into court with the Disney Corporation, Bob…

Mark E Smith with Austin Collings - Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E Smith

8 May 2008

MUSIC BIOGRAPHY (Viking) The real joy of Mark E Smith and The Fall has always been expecting the unexpected. His music has always stuck to a rigid formula but is somehow never formulaic, and he’s survived every British musical subculture since punk…

Bob Dylan book shines light on star qualities

28 Sep 2007

A new book will be published next month which looks at the contribution Bob Dylan has made to popular music. Bob Dylan: The Never Ending Star will give a new insight into singer’s career, put into context using theories of fame. The book deals…

Also Published

5 Biographies

26 Mar 2007

Steven Bach Leni The life and times of Leni Riefenstahl, the controversial filmmaker who maintained right up til her death four years ago, that the footage she filmed of Hitler and his like didn’t mean that she was a Nazi herself. Oh contraire, reckons…

Fur: An Imaginary Portrait Of Diane Arbus

13 Mar 2007

Director Steven Shainberg broke plenty of taboos a few years ago with his sado-masochistic love story Secretary, and he’s clearly been emboldened to create an even more outré romance in Fur. It’s hard to imagine, however, that the estate of Diane Arbus…

Harvey Pekar

Ego and Hubris (Ballantine Books)

12 Feb 2007

BIOGRAPHY/LIFE STORY Meet Michael Malice - childhood immigrant, dreamer, short-ass and egotist. In some ways he’s just another mildly schizophrenic man, raised in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, but to Pekar (the graphic novel’s greatest navel gazer) he is…

Comic - Marjane Satrapi

Marjane Satrapi

22 Nov 2006

BIOGRAPHY Having recounted the story of her own life in Persepolis, Iranian cartoonist Marjane Satrapi here tells the tale of the strange death of her great uncle, Nasser Ali Khan. By all accounts Khan was a world-class musician, and by Satrapi’s he…