Max Beerbohm once observed there were some writers who have been spoiled by their desire to do “important” work: “Some people are born to lift heavy weights. Some are born to juggle with golden balls.

We were surprised to discover that Louis Begley, consummate chronicler of Waspy things, had written a “biographical essay” on Franz Kafka. (Perhaps we shouldn’t have been: Both men, besides being ...

As an experienced biographer, Hermione Lee knows a hungry audience. “Readers of biography are greedy readers, with an insatiable appetite for detail and story,” writes the British scholar, a professor ...

LADY PRESTWICH, who survived her husband, Sir Joseph Prestwich, but little more than three years, died in 1899 at the age of sixty-six. They were married in 1870, and settled at Shoreham, near ...