6 *** Saturday 16 November 2019 The Daily Telegraph The Daily Telegraph Saturday 16 November 2019 *** 7 BOOKS OF THE YEAR BIOGRAPHY questionable parsing of the loot. Years, we see the project beginning history. “Until reported, after might prompt that thought too, “How many American women of to form, along with its obstacles. the lions have 20% off visiting a thanks to Selina Todd’s excellent her generation had lovers, male and “Her main concern is the choice their own all these titles from seven-year-old Tastes of Honey (Chatto & female, as numerous, beautiful, and between ‘I’ and ‘she’,” Ernaux historians,” Telegraph Books. Call boy in foster Windus, £18.99), though prominent?” Moser asks about writes. “There is something too Achebe wrote, care in Delaney’s working-class Susan Sontag. And, 300 pages later: permanent about ‘I’, something “then the story 0844 871 1514 or see Lancashire in background was closer to “How many people, after all, need shrunken and stifling, whereas ‘she’ of the hunt will books.telegraph.co.uk/ 1974. Well, no: Ernaux’s, and her ambition Portraits of those to exhort themselves to bathe?” His is too exterior and remote.” The always glorify Norman was not twinned with angry wit.) That’s rhetorical formulation gives the balance she strikes is the book we the hunter.” bestbooks the problem. And too easy an assumption, but the game away: if Moser sees his are holding: nothing else Grant’s subjects his name was not existence of these two books is who didn’t fit in subject as extreme, then there must approaches the intimacy and speak about the cold Norman. Norman like a blaze of survival: the raw be some kind of “normal” she is majesty of its sweep. and the dirt and the cost, Greenwood was Lemn revealing of a strongest self, as a failing to be. Who is the biographer discrimination and heartache, Sissay, born to an Ethiopian “happy” child learns to make to determine such things? here has been an intriguing the birth of the carnival, all manner student as a result of an act by a trouble, before finding a way to While Sontag’s behaviour was T drift, in many biographies, of lost-ness. One, the writer Viv man she called “the cruelest person show the world that the trouble felt by her biographer to require towards restitution: restoring Adams, may be the most poetic in the world”. Just four years ago lay elsewhere all along. explanation, the ruthless Lucian certain stories to their voice of the biographical year: “We Sissay managed to get hold of all his Countless threads might be Freud’s was not, by his. To devote protagonists. The Five were embarked upon something of official files: the result Myis Name drawn between these books – 700 pages to half the life of a painter (Transworld, £16.99) is Hallie glamour,” he says, “that lay beyond Is Why (Canongate, £16.99), a surprising, inconsequential links, The most striking image to t is an unholy practice, as nakedly self-interested as Freud Rubenhold’s stirring and tomorrow.” Their generation, Grant memoir as unvarnished as it is like the reading of Dostoevsky, or ‘I the telling of a life story requires an exceptional level of tact impressively detailed argues, “redefined the very notion eloquent. The author reclaims his addresses in Knightsbridge. But emerge from this year’s Lives that isn’t one’s own,” the – or at least, that is what William reconstruction of the lives of the of what it is to be British.” life, after suffering an identity theft there is a line that shoots like biographical writer Janet Feaver brings to The Lives of five women murdered by Jack the The godmother of “novels in at the hands of institutional power. lightning through many of the is of a society blinkered by Malcolm suggested Lucian Freud: Youth (Bloomsbury, Ripper in Whitechapel in 1888. voices”, as she calls them, is the It’s tempting to imagine, reading lives described: the deprivation earlier this year. The occasion was a £35), the first of two volumes. With Rubenhold shows that only two of magnificent Belarusian Nobel this and Lowborn (Chatto & and prejudice that have passed for prejudice, says Gaby Wood review of Sontag (Allen Lane, £30) remarkable elegance, Feaver – who the women could be proven to laureate Svetlana Alexievich, whose Windus, £14.99), by the novelist allowable living conditions in this by Benjamin Moser, whose spoke to Freud almost daily – gives have worked as prostitutes, yet for decades-long oral project has been Kerry Hudson, that writing is a country for well over a century. It intelligence-gathering diligence is a robust and intricate evocation of 130 years Annie Chapman, to tell – or rather hear – a version of route out of hardship. (The life of is their most memorable shared occasionally undermined by his the man at work: on canvas, in the Elizabeth Stride, Polly Nichols, history that has been silenced or the playwright Shelagh Delaney attribute, and it is sobering. world and in his mind. rendered small. Her latest book to “I thought you were your own be translated into English, Last Romeo,” Freud’s grandfather Witnesses (Penguin Classics, Sigmund quipped, when the £12.99), was in fact her second, teenage Lucian said he’d been to the written in the early Eighties, after theatre. As predictions go, it wasn’t the masterpiece now titled The bad. The boy would go on to father ‘Until the lions have Unwomanly Face of War. Composed 14 children and claim that of the testimonies of Russians who “everything is a self-portrait”. Freud their own historians, were children during the Second was forever getting drunk, crashing World War, it grew out of an earlier cars, chasing women and losing the story of the hunt volume about female Russian bets; it’s a wonder he had any time will glorify the hunter’ soldiers: some of its protagonists left for painting. “Lucian told me he were their children. Her most pure often had girls who had had off the and pared-back work, Last ‘trouble’ with their fathers,” a spectrum Witnesses is so searingly narrated former lover reports. It’s a pinprick The Meteorologist, by its multiple recollectors that, as of pain – why did so many women 2014 in Stickybeak she told me when I visited her in put themselves in Freud’s path? by Julie Cockburn Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Minsk earlier this year, “I tried to Feaver places that point on the (Chose Commune, Kelly have all been classed that put my comments beside them, but penultimate page, and leaves it. We €40/£34) way. Consciously or not, it has you couldn’t put anything that are left to judge, or not judge, become a moralising shorthand for would be equal to that text”. As Freud’s trajectory for ourselves. women at a certain level of poverty twin tomes, Alexievich’s works on If life was a part of Freud’s art, or despair. Why has history been women and children are Walter Gropius fostered the idea so lacking in curiosity about this unbeatable – and only just bearable. that art should be part of life. He aspect of the facts? Jack the Ripper The central drama of Bart van navigated the egos of artists and the can only retain his cultish infamy, Es’s The Cut Out Girl (Penguin, advent of the Nazis, had a lasting Rubenhold argues, if his victims £9.99), winner of this year’s Costa influence on architects and COMMUNE / CHOSE GALLERY OF FLOWERS COURTESY JULIE COCKBURN, are forgotten. So their invisibility is Prize, is also the Second World War. designers of the 20th century, and no accident: “We have become Lien, the titular character, was cut has occupied the thoughts of the Cumming’s parents went on to be looking” are its author’s real muffled. Ernaux is a significant complicit in their diminishment.” out of her context multiple times, spry, eminent biographer Fiona artists; she is the Observer’s art subject. “In life as in art we do not figure in French literature, having Between 1948 and 1963, 300,000 like the little paper figures glued on MacCarthy for several decades. In critic. “Nobody notices the legs the always see what is going on at the coined over decades a way of people migrated to the UK from the to empty white pages in her Walter Gropius (Faber, £30), she first time,” she writes of the edges,” she writes. A story of this recording individual experience in West Indies, fleeing unemployment childhood notebook. Sent away by takes a man often accused of being Bruegel painting. “Bruegel played sort lay within her family, and the brief, sharp volumes. The Years is a at home and encouraged, as her Dutch Jewish family before the humourless and cold, and renders upon our habits of looking five beauty in Cumming’s book comes different endeavour altogether: a colonial residents, to come and help rest of them died in the Holocaust, him charismatic, resilient and more hundred years ago, knowing that from her patience with the patchwork of collective history, up with postwar reconstruction. “As she grew up alongside Van Es’s subtly significant. She is also funny we would be a good while paradoxical notion of choosing not close yet depersonalised, so that an far as you can look it bomb and father. But by the time Van Es was in his defence. “Sexually,” she notes, pondering the ploughman, the sun, to see, among people whose sight entire century of unprecedented burn outright through and born, Lien had been cut out again, “Gropius was far from negligible.” the sea and ship” before we see a was their livelihood.