Bundle of Joyce
Sandy Toksvig finds Joyce Grenfell a funny gal, but not an endearing woman in Janie Hampton's detailed biography of the genteel entertainer
The nearly man
Kathryn Hughes appreciates Michael Slater's Douglas Jerrold, the story of a Victorian literary star to whom time has not been kind
There is nothing like a dame
George Melly is pleased to discover that Barry Humphries writes beautifully of his 'real' life in his memoir, My Life as Me
War and peace
Seamus Deane on Patricia Craig's biography of Brian Moore, an Irish exile who spent a lifetime purging himself of Belfast's sectarian hatreds
Pevsner a Nazi? Don’t be so ridiculous
Britain's foremost architectural historian survives a scurrilous attack made against him in Stephen Games's introduction to Pevsner on Art and Architecture, thanks to his own words
Life before Titchmarsh and Dimmock
What went into 19th-century compost? Bull's blood, scum and goose dung. Jill Sinclair
Less than the sum of its luminous parts
Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds by Harold Bloom. Reviewed by Sven Birkerts
Disturber of the peace
The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken by Terry Teachout. Reviewed by Richard Lingeman
Behind every artist
The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired by Francine Prose. Reviewed by Elaine Showalter
In life as in fiction, Greene’s taunts left Americans in a quiet fury
US compiled secret reports on novelist for years, FBI files show.
The biographer, the stately homo and the existentialist tramp
What remains of Quentin Crisp and Philip O'Connor beyond Andrew Barrow's double biography, Quentin and Philip?
Read my blips
Bob Woodward had access to the President and all his men. It's a pity he's made so little use of it in Bush at War