Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know

No - not Byron, but Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose biography I have just finished. He might have been an important philosopher; he might have invented one of the first jet engines; and he might have come from one of the most illustrious families in Europe - but he lived at the bizarre end of the social spectrum. He was writing all the time, but only published one book in his own lifetime. He drove his colleagues to distraction with non-stop ranting. He physically assaulted his students. Suicide was never far from his mind. He inherited millions but lived like a hermit. He ruined the professional careers of his most promising students. And in the end he repudiated his own work. There is lots more here.

Virginia Woolf

We've enlarged the Virginia Woolf section of our site by adding a couple of recently published items. Alexandra Harris had a big success last year with her extended study Romantic Moderns, and she's followed it up pretty smartly with Virginia Woolf. This combines a brief account of Woolf's life history with a very enthusiastic introduction to her major novels. Then, for a taste of the real thing, have a look at On Fiction, a collection of Woolf's essays on writing and the novel. In these she sketches out very elegantly some of the ideas she developed at greater length in later works such as A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas.

Igor Stravinsky: The Second ExileFrance and America 1934-1971

The first volume of this masterly biography ends in 1934 with the death of Diaghilev, Stravinsky's composition of Persephone, his adoption of French citizenship, and his no less important decision to move his extended family from the south of France to take up residence in Paris - in the next arrondissement to his lover, Vera Sudeykima. To give some idea of the complexities of these arrangements, Stravinsky not only made it known to his wife that he paid Sudeykima an allowance, but as if this was not enough he heaped onto it the additional humiliation that in his absence she should hand over the money to her in person - which ... Read more >>

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