biography

The author Amanda Foreman is being accused of turning the genteel world of historical biography into a playground for glamorous young female writers trying to make a quick killing in the bestseller lists.

Well, perhaps taking off your clothes to sell your book could be construed as cheapening the genre. Who needs talent when you’ve got tits?

Celebrity memoirs, breathless lives of 18th-century socialites and countless royal mistresses - whatever happened to the golden age of biography? And what is the future for a genre in which the best subjects have already been written about, time and again, asks Kathryn Hughes.

Donald H. Rumsfeld, the powerful defense secretary and architect of the Iraq War who left office two years ago as he faced ever-rising criticism, is working on a memoir to be published by Penguin Group (USA) in 2010.

This is a disturbing story. Jessica Queller talks about her biographical book Pretty Is What Changes, that chronicles her decision to have a prophylactic double mastectomy at a young age after discovering she has the breast/ovarian cancer gene mutation.

When author Rachel Cusk wrote A Life's Work, her disarmingly frank account of motherhood, she was shocked by the vicious reaction it provoked from other women. The experience forced her to question herself as a writer and a parent, as she records here.

A FIERCE debate between two Boyd family biographers has broken out over the death in 1972 of the novelist Martin Boyd, who spent his last days in the Hospital of the Blue Nuns in Rome.

One claims to get the suicide angle from the writer’s family. The other, after years of research, was seemingly never told. Big stink.

The Australian newspaper found people living in Sierra Leone who said the timeline in the Beah's memoir, A Long Way Gone, was not accurate. Beah has previously rejected the claims, but Beah has come back with more evidence to support his story. "A man named Mr. Barry who claims to have been the head of the school I attended when I was young... The principal of my school was Mr. Sidiki Brahima."

"He's lucky that he didn't have to pay a high price, but by the end of the story the reader is wondering whether someone else might have, due to Mr. Venkatesh's unintended encouragement of J.T. Yes, evil really can be attractive... when I return to the thought of encouraging and feeding the ego of a gang leader for six years running, I can't bring myself to be attracted to this book."

The mass murderer Harold Shipman has been added to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, earning a place alongside the likes of Peter Ustinov, John Peel and Alistair Cooke. The dictionary is a roll call of those who have left their mark on British society, so I guess Shipman qualifies. I’m sure he’d be tickled to know of his inclusion.

Gunter Grass is suing the publisher of his biography, written by Michael Juergs, because of a line in the work that flatly states Grass volunteered for the Waffen-SS. Grass is adamant that he was drafted into service. The line was not present in the initial version of the biography but was added after Grass later revealed his SS affiliation.