Frances Wilson

Irresistible Iris

Iris Murdoch’s readers return to her to understand the relationship between high intelligence, erotic extremism, and moral virtue.

Kate’s Two Bodies

Central to the PR crisis over Kate Middleton’s cancer diagnosis is whether her body should be seen as mortal or immortal.

‘Diabolical Fame’

Composed of rhapsody and opinionation, without shape or chronology, Roger Lewis’s biography of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton tries to get at the strangeness of stardom.

Across the Moominverse

Small books bearing great burdens, the Moomins contain the whole arsenal of Western literature.

Descriptions of a Struggle

Kafka’s diaries—made up of false starts, stray thoughts, self-doubts, internal dialogues, dreams, doodles, aphorisms, drafts of stories, character sketches, and scenes from family life—are often very funny.

Very Free and Indirect

The intensity of experience that Katherine Mansfield sought in her short life is matched by the formal obliqueness she discovered in her stories.

The Real Christie Mystery

Agatha Christie’s Nightmares

Lucy Worsley’s biography spans a long career driven by an almost addictive need to write.

Meet the Parents

In Claudia Durastanti’s autofictional novel about growing up with deaf parents, she is more at ease with her family’s unknowability than her own.

‘Invitations to Dig Deeper’

At a time when pleasure was considered suspect by politically engaged socialists, Orwell wrote about roses.

The Double Bookkeeper

A new biography of Patricia Highsmith and a new edition of her journals give us a personal history of twentieth-century sexual control, of lives lived not in the closet but in the cellar.

A Family Romance

While Sybille Bedford’s books were autobiographical, her life was novelistic.