The Sunday Times biography of the year

Casanova: Philosopher, Gambler, Lover, Priest by Ian Kelly
Hodder £20
The subtitle of this delicious biography should include 'Gourmand'. Born into the 'last great age of Venetian cooking', the notorious libertine Casanova saw eating and sex as interchangeable. Women should smell like ripe cheese, he opined, and it was Casanova, Kelly suggests, who first saw the aphrodisiac qualities of oysters. Between courses, Casanova was on the run: from women, from the victims of his cons and from Venice, where he escaped from jail after being imprisoned for matters ‘of religion'. Much more than a serial seducer, Casanova was a great European intellectual, a romantic, a trickster and a writer of tremendous skill and energy. He was probably, as he would be the first to admit, the most interesting man who ever lived, as this vivid and vibrant biography suggests.

SNOWDON by ANNE DE COURCY
Weidenfeld £20
Books about bad marriages make good reads. As the 18 years of alcohol-fuelled hell shared by the driven and determined Lord Snowdon and the drifting and directionless Princess Margaret were possibly the worst marriage on royal record, there is no need to stress the pleasure to be gained from de Courcy's authorised biography of the former Anthony Armstrong-Jones. Based on interviews with a wide range of sources, de Courcy's book succeeds in creating a portrait of its subject that is both unflattering and sympathetic. Snowdon's ghastliness to his frequently wretched wife was matched only by his ghastly mother's ghastliness to him when he was a frequently wretched child; which perhaps explains why, as a father to his own children, legitimate and illegitimate (the first of whom was born while he was on his honeymoon with Margaret), he lacks a certain warmth. This is a powerful account of a damaged and damaging womaniser and workaholic, whose brilliance as a photographer was both stultified and stimulated by his royal status.

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE by MARK BOSTRIDGE
Viking £25
Bostridge removes the famous lamp that has prevented us from being able to see Nightingale clearly for so long, and replaces it with a great spotlight, so the woman who emerges from this superb biography is sharper and more terrifyingly illuminated than she has ever been before. Stripping away 150 years of myth-making, Bostridge reveals an often impossible human being whose limitless ego and energy left her family enervated. A statistician of genius, Nightingale excelled at administration rather than nursing. Devoting herself to the sick, she was sick herself for the last half-century of her long life, when she commanded all the action - sorting out the drainage system of India and setting up the Nightingale school of nursing - from her bed.

THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS: The Authorised Biography of VS Naipaul by PATRICK FRENCH
Picador £20
Henry Miller remarked that the heart of a writer is a writer and not a human being, which describes the Naipaul revealed in French's chilling and masterful biography of the famously rude author. Based on hundreds of letters and interviews, including with Naipaul himself (conversations described as “the strangest experience of my professional life”), French's book tells the story of the Nobel prizewinner's Trinidadian childhood, his battle with British racism, his depressions, his grim first marriage and his meteoric literary success. The most remarkable aspect of this frank and utterly fascinating portrait is that it is authorised. As Naipaul explains: “I remain completely indifferent to how people think about me, because I was serving this thing called literature.”

A STRANGE EVENTFUL HISTORY: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their Remarkable Families by MICHAEL HOLROYD
Chatto £25
In Holroyd's first biography in 15 years, not one but several lives strut across the stage. Ellen Terry, the actress who, as Virginia Woolf said, put all the other actors out like lights when she came on, is accompanied by her theatrical partner, His Immensity Henry Irving (so called by Bernard Shaw), and the curtain falls on Ellen's son, the theatrical designer Edward Gordon Craig, who sired 13 offspring (one by Isadora Duncan) and collaborated with Stanislavsky. This is a magnificently detailed and atmospheric epic spanning 120 years and involving mistaken deaths, squabbles, triumphs and obsessions in the lives of two theatrical dynasties.

QUEEN OF THE WITS: A Life of Laetitia Pilkington by NORMA CLARKE
Faber £25
Anything that could go wrong did go wrong in Laetitia Pilkington's life, so it is a good thing she kept her wits about her. Too clever for her dreary husband, who stopped at nothing to get shot of her, Pilkington found herself alone and divorced in London 1738, which was equivalent to being on the Titanic in 1912. Not one to sink, she swam for all she was worth and set herself up as a poet-courtesan, producing words on demand and charging for the quality of her company. A gripping story about what it was to be a wit, a woman and a writer in the Age of Reason, Clarke's book shows a side of the 18th century not seen in our current parade of bodice biographies.

THE SUSPICIONS OF MR WHICHER: Or the Murder at Road Hill House by KATE SUMMERSCALE
Bloomsbury £11.99
In this thrillingly good read, Summerscale unravels a notorious Victorian murder mystery with a biographer's skill, creating a powerful picture of the lives - including that of the beleaguered detective, Mr Whicher - that were affected by and implicated in the horrendous slaughter of a four-year-old in Wiltshire in 1860. The book might best be defined as a “nonfiction novel”, the term Truman Capote coined to describe his biographical experiment, In Cold Blood, which also tells the tale of a seemingly senseless killing that shattered a community, and it is with all of Capote's panache that Summerscale reconstructs the events surrounding the Road Hill House murder. Her book is very much about the birth of the detective story, which took the case as its foundation stone, and for a few months turned the whole country into amateur sleuths.

THE AGE OF WONDER by RICHARD HOLMES
HarperPress £25
Time was (between the voyages of the Endeavour in 1768 and the Beagle in 1831) when those wielding quills and those building telescopes were on the same side of the cultural divide, poets and scientists uniting in wonder at nature's mysteries. The voyage of exploration - “through strange seas of Thought, alone”, as Wordsworth wrote of Newton - is the ultimate Romantic metaphor, which makes the findings of Romantic science the perfect subject for Holmes. In The Age of Wonder, he brings the full force of his love and understanding of the Romantic age to the lives of three pioneering figures, the botanist Joseph Banks, the astronomer William Herschel (who could, as Holmes writes, “read the night sky like a skilled musician sight-reading a musical score”) and Humphry Davy, the inventor of laughing gas. Holmes's writing, like the figures he describes, is “driven by a common ideal of intense, even reckless, personal commitment to discovery”, and this is what makes this book so wonderful.

POE: A Life Cut Short by PETER ACKROYD
Chatto £15.99
A brief, painful and dark biography of a brief, painful and dark life, Ackroyd's tribute to the master of the gothic, whose literary output was itself brief, painful and dark, is perfectly poised and precise. Edgar Allen Poe's life was miserable from start to finish. Orphaned following the death of his travelling-actor parents, he became estranged from his foster father, dependent on drink and on his 13-year-old wife. One of the first professional writers (his classics include The Raven), he earned no more than £300 in his lifetime and died young in mysterious circumstances. Ackroyd punches the details home in spare and pitiless prose.

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