Alas, I was thoroughly spoiled for this by reading David Starkey and Alison Weir on the same subject last year. Though irritated by the writing style I kept hoping that at least I would learn something new; but when I had finished the first quarter of the book without finding anything that had not been covered better by either Starkey or Weir, I ( Read more... )

31) Elizabeth I, by David Starkey
32) The Life of Elizabeth I, by Alison Weir ( Read more... )

13) Slide Rule: An Autobiography, by Neville Shute

Probably my last book of 2007, and it's good to end on a high note - thanks, nickbarnes, for the recommendation; it was a good call. It's a book in three parts: the first couple of chapters describe Shute's boyhood and youth, where the most exciting part is his close observation of the Easter Rising of 1916 ( Read more... )

5) The Shadows of Eliza Lynch: How a Nineteenth-century Irish Courtesan Became the Most Powerful Woman in Paraguay, by Siân Rees ( Read more... )

17) James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, by Julie Phillips (.co.uk, .com)

This is surely a model of how to write a biography. Although her subject died in 1987, Julie Phillips has been through all her private papers, done the necessary bureaucratic sleuthing through her career, dug into her parents' background, interviewed the ( Read more... )

20) Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism, by Marina Warner


( Read more... )

9) Malachy, by Brian Scott ( Read more... )

6) William Heinemann: A Memoir, by Frederic Whyte

I chased this down because the author was a distant relative of mine, and it is the most easily obtainable (and the cheapest) of his books, published in 1929, nine years after the death of its subject, the London publisher William Heinemann. I was reading it really for information about the author ( Read more... )

5) Alexander Hamilton, by Ron Chernow

Thanks to spending yesterday in bed I have finished this massive biography, which would have taken me otherwise another couple of weeks. As it happens the last book I read I also finished in bed feeling ill, and it was also a biography of a late 18th-century political figure, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. ( Read more... )

4) Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, by Amanda Foreman

I'm not in principle a big fan of the 18th century, but I read McCullough's John Adams just over a year ago and have spent today in bed with the Duchess of Devonshire, as it were. They were contemporaries (she was born just over twenty years after him, and he died just over twenty years after ( Read more... )