The best biographies and memoirs of 2014

A golden age of memoir and a fresh outing for old favourites Kim Philby and Queen Victoria – in this year’s roundup of life writing

Adam Begley’s’s biography reveals how John Updike mined his own life for his fiction. Photograph: Michael Brennan/Corbis

Paul Laity

Thursday 4 December 2014 - The Guardian

It’s sometimes said that cradle-to-grave doorstopper biographies are a thing of the past – that readers (and writers) now prefer something slighter, a life approached at an angle, or an account structured in a less traditional way.
There have, however, been memorable examples of the old form this year, including John Campbell’s Roy Jenkins (Jonathan Cape), a superb study of the “very social democrat”, and the first volume of Stephen Kotkin’s monumental Stalin (Allen Lane), in which he identifies the qualities that enabled his subject to assume fearsome power, including clarity of thought, “surpassing organisational abilities” and “a mammoth appetite for work”. Joan of Arc (Faber), Helen Castor’s enjoyable retelling of the tale of the Maid of Orléans, is strong on political and military context and timely in its concentration on war fuelled by religious belief.

AN Wilson’s Victoria: A Life (Atlantic) is a confident, engaging tribute to the monarch we think we know well, but actually don’t, offering as it does a reminder of her jollier side, as well as her strong opinions, shocking record as a parent and her Europeanness. Eleanor Marx (Bloomsbury) by Rachel Holmes might be seen as a companion book to Wilson’s: a well-received study of the multilingual campaigning daughter of the Prussian inventor of communism, it’s a different optic through which to view Victorian internationalism, and a must for those (I know you are out there) who want to immerse themselves in late-19th century leftwing political agitation.
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