In this remarkable new biography, Peter Ackroyd offers a different view of Dickens to that presented in his earlier study of the author. In that book, Ackroyd's attempts to mimic the voice of the great writer were highly controversial, though some saw the book as a radical re-invention of the biography form. There is no arguing with the brilliant achievement of the more straightforward Charles Dickens: Public Life and Private Passion, however; the picture of Dickens and his complicated private life that emerges is fastidiously detailed and powerfully evocative, while Ackroyd's customary skill at creating a panoply of the city of London is as dazzling as ever (London, is, in fact, the subject of another biography by the author, who is unquestionably the keenest chronicler of the city's colourful history). Here, Ackroyd attempts to peel away the mask of a man whose life was outwardly a picture of Victorian rectitude, but whose love life was as complicated (and unconventional) as any modern writer. Dickens had everything-fame, success and riches-but he died harbouring a deep sadness he had experienced all his life. He was a man of mercurial character, had enormous vitality and humour, but he also had a sense of loss and longing that would constantly appear in his work. Like many eminent Victorians, he led a double life: although he insisted that nothing in the newspapers he edited should upset his middle-class readers, he regularly indulged in dubious night-time escapades with fellow author Wilkie Collins, and, for the last 13 years of his life, kept a secret mistress. While presenting a warm but astringent portrait of the man who (along with George Eliot) can be classed as the greatest writer of his age, Ackroyd also masterfully recreates the relationship with the actress Ellen Ternan, a strong and intelligent woman (herself the subject of a biography by Claire Tomalin, The Inviisble Woman who, like her lover, outwardly observed the proprieties while living her real life behind closed doors. Ackroyd also vividly conjures the reality of Victorian life, the issues that sparked Dickens' fervent call for social reform, and the great landmarks of the time, which profoundly affected his life and work. -Barry Forshaw.

Ben Jonson claimed of his great rival Shakespeare that his art was not of an age but for all time. While this timeless approach to Shakespeare has become deeply unfashionable in recent years, riding over the horizon to rescue the Bard from the fiendish clutches of political correctness comes Harold Bloom, fresh from defending and defining The Western Canon back in 1994. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is not simply a passionate defence of Shakespeare from what Bloom sees as the horrors of the "School of Resentment"-namely feminist, materialist and historicist accounts of the Bard. Bloom argues that Shakespeare, "by inventing what has become the most accepted mode for representing character and personality in language, thereby invented the human as we know it". So forget Marlowe or Jonson (dismissed on the first page), or even Michelangelo (although his Sistine Chapel adorns the book's dustjacket). Returning to the character analysis of his beloved Dr Johnson and A C Bradley, Bloom offers a play-by-play account of how Shakespeare defines the category of the human as we understand it, which is personified for Bloom by the characters of Hamlet and Falstaff (Bloom's self-confessed role model). The result is at turns fascinating, controversial, provocative and downright bizarre. There are some wonderfully aphoristic insights: Rosalind (alongside Cleopatra one of the few female characters given much space in Bloom's argument) is "Jane Austen to Falstaff's Samuel Johnson", whilst Leontes in A Winter's Tale is "an Othello who is his own Iago". But the sheer scale of Bloom's central claim, reiterated again and again, leaves the book feeling repetitious and in thrall to its own verbal fireworks, which are often substituted for any sustained analysis of the originality of Shakespeare's language. This is a pity as so much space is given up throughout the book to wonderful passages from the plays. [+]

"The time will come in your life when the voice of God will thunder at you from a cloud, 'From this day forth thou shalt not be able to put on thine own socks'". So writes the playwright, novelist and erstwhile QC, John Mortimer. And as a septuagenarian, he is writing from experience. But it's not the effort it takes to put on socks, or the need to use people as props to stop falling over, or the sad fact that one may be compelled to buy a "Decorative Window Film" to prevent against walking into glass doors that Mortimer objects to. "The real trouble with old age", he says, "is it lasts for such a short time". The Summer of a Dormouse is a wickedly funny journal in which Mortimer wryly observes the absurdities of old age. After all, "No one should grow old who isn't ready to appear ridiculous". And Mortimer freely admits he often does. Such as the time he unintentionally pirouetted down some marble steps after getting out of a hotel bathtub and crashed into a set of shelves. "I fell amongst splintering glass and a hailstorm of cotton-wool buds, aware of a torrent of destruction". [+]

Short and snappy as it is, Stephen King's On Writing really contains two books: a fondly sardonic autobiography and a tough-love lesson for aspiring novelists. The memoir is terrific stuff, a vivid description of how a writer grew out of a misbehaving kid. You are right there with the young author as he is tormented by poison ivy, gas-passing baby-sitters, uptight schoolmarms and a laundry job nastier than Jack London's. It's a ripping yarn that casts a sharp light on his fiction. This was a child who dug Yvette Vickers from Attack of the Giant Leeches, not Sandra Dee. "I wanted monsters that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers and girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash". But massive reading on all literary levels was a craving just as crucial, and soon King was the published author of "I Was a Teen-Age Graverobber". As a young adult raising a family in a trailer, King started a story inspired by his stint as a caretaker cleaning a high-school girls' locker room. He crumpled it up, but his writer wife retrieved it from the trash, and using her advice about the girl milieu and his own memories of two reviled teenage classmates who died young, he came up with Carrie. King gives us lots of revelations about his life and work. [+]

The author of one of the great memoirs of the century, Cider With Rosie, was also one of the most secretive and elusive of men. "The most devious person it is possible to invent", said his brother Jack. And Lee himself admitted, "I am a person of concealment. No one has ever managed to get through. " Whether Valerie Grove ever really gets through, in this magisterial, 500-page biography, is perhaps open to debate. But she brings Lee vividly to life, in all his charm and flirtatiousness, lyricism and laziness. From his early childhood in the beautiful Slad valley in the Cotswolds, to his time in the Spanish Civil War (where he may or may not have fought at the terrible battle of Teruel-depending whom you believe), to his latter days sitting in the Chelsea Arts Club, the Great Author, with a keen eye for a pretty girl in a short skirt, was no intellectual, no thinker. He appeared to have no convictions or opinions and lived entirely through his senses. Perhaps that is why he remains such an elusive character to comprehend. Nevertheless this is a fine and enjoyable biography, the first to be written since his death, with the full co-operation of his estate and access to his wonderful letters. [+]