John Lennon once described Yoko Ono as “the world’s most famous unknown artist. Everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does.” Others were more vicious, portraying her as a family... Read more »
Boarding a flight in 1983, Jane Birkin found herself wrestling with the open straw basket into which she habitually crammed everything from playscripts to nappies. As she reached for the overhead locker... Read more »
Most people could tell you that Francis Crick, together with James Watson, discovered the double helix structure of DNA, and shaped our understanding of how genes work. Fewer know that Crick also played a... Read more »
Terry Jones was a Python, a historian, a bestselling children’s author and a very naughty boy. He loved to play women in drag, started a magazine about countryside ecology (Vole), founded his... Read more »
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month. The post On Our Nightstands: September 2025 appeared first on Public Books. Source link Read more »
I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for Freedom is a new biography by Professor Julia Gaffield of William & Mary. The book sheds light on the life and legacy of... Read more »
Gwyneth: The Biography opens, where else, with the vaginal egg, an episode that has come to stand for Paltrow’s general ability to sell dumb ideas to credulous rich women using widespread mockery... Read more »
Of all the great intellectuals of the Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola is surely the most personally captivating. “He wins one on,” as the Victorian essayist Walter Pater put it, his life having... Read more »
As a youth she wasnât popular among her peers. âFat and freckly with red hair and mad about horses,â remembers Clarissa Churchill. âWe used to bully her.â Nancy Mitford was no kinder:... Read more »