Attila the Hun by John Man (Bantam Press, March 2005)
The story of the fifth-century Barbarian tribal chief.
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Bernard Shaw by Michael Holroyd (Vintage, 1998)
The definitive Shaw for general readers.
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Dickens by by Peter Ackroyd (Vintage, 2002)
Exhaustively researched with a hint of mystery.
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Elizabeth and Essex by Lytton Strachey (Penguin Books, 2000)
The story Elizabeth and Essex unfolds to its final catastrophe.
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Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey (Penguin Books, 1989)
Strachey debunks Victorian chauvinism and hypocrisy.
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Four Dubliners: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce and Beckett by Richard Ellman (Government Printing Office, 1986)
Set the standard for literary biography.
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Hawkwood: Diabolical Englishman by Frances Stonor Saunders (Faber & Faber, 2005)
The violent world of John Hawkwood, a 14th-century mercenary.
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Ivy: Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett by Hilary Spurling (Metro Books, 1996)
Biography of the novelist which reveals how her characters mirror aspects of her own nature. It also provides portraits of the eccentric friends with whom Ivy surrounded herself.
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Johnson on Savage: The life of Mr. Richard Savage by Samuel Johnson (Perennial, November 2005)
The first modern biography, originally published anonymously by Johnson the year after Savage's death.
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The Knife Man by Wendy Moore (Bantam, February 2005)
Eighteenth-century surgeon, anatomist and naturalist John Hunter was a leading Enlightenment figure but also had to pay grave-robbers for bodies to dissect.
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Lady's Maid by Margaret Forster (Vintage, 1998)
Fictionalised account of the marriage Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning.
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The Last English Revolutionary by Hugh Purcell (Sutton Publishing, 2004)
Depicts the ideological ferment of the 1920s and 30s through the life of Tom Wintringham, founder of the British Communist Party.
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The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett by Richard Ingrams (HarperCollins, June 2005)
The career of the Victorian satirist and reformer.
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The Life of Johnson by James Boswell (Oxford Paperbacks, 1998)
Johnson's lasting fame has as much to do with Boswell's brilliant biography as with his own literary output.
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Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday (Jonathan Cape, June 2005)
Based on 10 years' research, including interviews with members of Mao's inner circle.
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Mary Queen of Scots by Antonia Fraser (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2002)
Fraser does justice to fertile biographical material.
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The Master by Colm Toibin (Picador, January 2005)
A life of Henry James – novel or biography?
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Matisse the Master by Hilary Spurling (Hamish Hamilton, March 2005)
Spurling's second and final volume on Matisse.
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My Heart is My Own: The life of Mary Queen of Scots by John Guy (Perennial, 2004)
Argues that Mary was a clever politician in very difficult circumstances.
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Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K Massie (Orion, 1996)
How the young heir's haemophilia, and the decisive influence it brought Rasputin, was linked to the collapse of imperial Russia.
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Plutarch's Lives: Vol 1 (Random House, 2001)
A remarkable social history in the form of anecdotal portraits.
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Plutarch's Lives: Vol 2 (Random House, 2001)
A remarkable social history in the form of anecdotal portraits.
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Pétain by Charles Williams (Little Brown, May 2005)
The life of the peasant's son who became Marshal of the French army but ended in prison for treason.
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Queen Victoria by Lytton Strachey (Harvest Books, 2002)
The acerbic observations of Eminent Victorians give way to a much more sympathetic portrait.
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The Quest for Corvo by A J A Symons (New York Review of Books, 2001)
A remarkable combination of biography and self-portrait.
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Roger Fry by Virginia Woolf (Vintage, 2003)
Woolf agonised about what to include in this biography of her friend, the distinguished art historian and critic.
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Sickert: A life by Matthew Sturgis (HarperCollins, January 2005)
A thorough, thought-provoking life of painter Walter Sickert – who wasn't Jack the Ripper, says Sturgis.
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Wodehouse: A life by Robert McCrum (Penguin, September 2005)
The story of the revered comic writer, who became controversially embroiled with the Nazi regime during the war.
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