THE DIANA CHRONICLES by Tina Brown
Century £18.99

The shocking-pink, chick-lit-style cover does this book a disservice. Brown’s biography of Princess Diana is both comical and caustic in tone. The facts may be familiar, but Brown’s magpie eye is endlessly perceptive. Diana emerges as a dippy Sloane cursed with more charisma than she knew how to use, and the dowdy Windsors as a sad, strained, dysfunctional family, presided over by emotional paralysis. The whole adds up to a mordant portrait of the media age, in which the hunger for celebrity always devours itself.

YOUNG STALIN by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Weidenfeld £25

The prequel to Montefiore’s rapturously received Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, this volume tells the story of little Soso’s rise through the criminal underworld of Georgia, and then the Bolshevik party. The author’s depth of research, from the newly available archives in Tbilisi, Moscow, St Petersburg and beyond, is astonishing, but he shapes the material into a racy narrative, best exemplified by his reconstruction of a sickeningly violent bank robbery master-minded by Stalin, whose ruthlessness would be the template for decades of murderous tyranny.

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THE LODGER: Shakespeare on Silver Street by Charles Nicholl
Allen Lane £20

Amid a slew of books on Shakespeare this year, Bill Bryson’s was entertaining and informative, although it contained nothing new. Nicholl’s minute study of the years during which the playwright lodged in London’s Silver Street with the Mountjoy family is equally entertaining, and throws a new light on the man who was both a universal genius and just like us. As Nicholl notes, “It is piquant to find that the first actual documentation of Shakespeare in London is as a tax dodger.”

YOU CANNOT LIVE AS I HAVE LIVED AND NOT END UP LIKE THIS: The Thoroughly Disgraceful Life and Times of Willie Donaldson by Terence Blacker
Ebury £12.99

Although Blacker describes himself as a friend of Donaldson, and is clearly something of an admirer, the louche, aimless figure he portrays is not exactly likeable. The old, vicious Private Eye referred to Donaldson at various times as “disgusting”, “an appalling little shit”, “a slimy crook” and “a pimp”, which might sound a bit extreme, but by the end of this funny, scabrous, alarming, squalid, faintly depressing and extremely distinctive biography, any sensible reader will feel relief at the thought that Donaldson is now safely in his grave.

SYLVIA, QUEEN OF THE HEADHUNTERS: An Outrageous Englishwoman and Her Lost Kingdom by Philip Eade
Weidenfeld £20

The life of Sylvia Brooke, born in 1885, and by unlikely chance the Ranee of Sarawak before the war, is the kind of gift subject that biographers must dream of. The Brookes ruled over their personal fiefdom of 500,000 natives until 1946, when Sylvia’s husband handed it over to Britain, upon which two visiting MPs were presented by the local Dyaks with the severed head of the former Japanese director of education, still wearing his glasses. Colourful anecdotes of eccentricity, lunacy and infidelity crowd every page.

EINSTEIN: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson
Simon & Schuster £25

Unashamedly of the “Great Men of History” genre that only Americans write now, this is nevertheless a compelling biography of the little scientist who never wore socks and who changed the way we see the world. Isaacson elegantly and fluently interweaves Einstein’s interestingly chaotic personal life with confidently lengthy accounts of the work. He is also sharp on the ignorance that confuses the theory of relativity with moral relativism; while a “quantum leap”, as we should all know by now, would be very, very small.

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