C. Ball

A lively, entertaining read - would make a wonderful movie!, 14 Mar 2014

In her day Nellie Bly was one of the most famous women alive - one could buy Nellie Bly boardgames, school bags, hats and coats, stationary, lamps, photograph albums. Her image was used to sell face cream and soap, coffee and tobacco, baking soda and spices. Her record-breaking round-the-world trip in 72 days, beating Jules Verne's '80 Days', made her a sensation, her every move and exploit followed daily in the pages of her own newspaper The New York World and other papers across America. Her competitor, on the other hand, Elizabeth Bisland enjoyed no such fame - the perennial fate of those who come in second, but a fate she much preferred.

It is always fascinating to explore… Read more

If ever a novel deserves its own biography, it would be The Great Gatsby..., 11 Mar 2014

The writer John O'Hara commented at F. Scott Fitzgerald's funeral that "he should have been killed in a Bugatti in the south of France", and I can't think of a more accurate statement on the life and death of the author of The Great Gatsby. Whilst not exactly old at the time of his death (he was 44), Fitzgerald died old in spirit: tired, worn-out and broken down - and such an end seemed so at odds with the way he and Zelda lived. No-one else epitomized the fast set of the Roaring Twenties the way they did; if anyone seemed born to live fast, die young and leave a pretty corpse, it was Scott and Zelda. Fitzgerald transmuted so much of their own lives into his fiction, and yet in the… Read more

Asher captures Lawrence here in all his strange, curious, contradictory glory..., 8 Mar 2014

This is not your typical biography of a legendary figure. Part pilgrimage, part travelogue, part mythological debunking, part psychological unveiling - it's all here in this book. T.E. Lawrence, known to posterity as Lawrence of Arabia, was an...interesting figure, to say the least, and Asher captures him here in all his strange, curious, contradictory glory.

I'm not sure I've ever read a biography that probed so deeply into a subject's psyche before (although the accuracy of that probing I'll leave to more qualified minds than mine), and I certainly don't think I've ever read a biography of such a strange individual. A psychiatrist would have had a field day with Lawrence -… Read more