Best memoirs and biographies: from Britney Spears to the Beckhams

In the Blood by Julia Hamilton and Arabella Byrne

Julia Hamilton is a novelist in her 60s, said Juliet Nicolson in The Spectator. Her daughter, Arabella Byrne, is a journalist in her 40s. In their new joint memoir, the pair reflect with "devastating clarity" on the illness – alcoholism – that has severely damaged both their lives. They begin by tracing back the "boozy branches of their elite family tree", said Ceci Browning in The Sunday Times. Julia's grandfather, a Scottish aristocrat, "pissed away" much of the family fortune; her parents also "drank too much". Growing up in the 1960s, drink for Julia was a "passport to glamour" – and a refuge from her parents' bickering. But it turned her into a dysfunctional adult (she'd been married three times by the age of 30) and a neglectful mother to Arabella – who, 20 years later, "followed blindly in her mother's footsteps", chugging bottles of wine in bed, or a "canned G&T or two on the way to work". "In the Blood" "reads in places like a posh EastEnders": the desperate tales it recounts invariably occur in rather grand places. There are better addiction memoirs out there, but this one still "makes a mark".

Both women did eventually tackle their drinking, said Lucy Denyer in The Daily Telegraph. A cousin introduced Julia to Alcoholics Anonymous, and soon she was attending regularly. When Arabella also decided to go to a meeting, she was shocked to find her mother there. A memoir about two alcoholics "leaving a trail of wreckage" before managing to "get sober" sounds both "depressing and mawkish". But impressively, "In the Blood" is neither. Instead, it's a "cool, blunt retelling of events, written in prose that's eloquent, starkly self-scrutinising, and at times even funny". As much about mothers and daughters as it is about alcoholism, it has "stayed in my mind since the moment I put it down".

The Memoir: Part One by Cher

"There was some sniggering" when the news broke that Cherilyn Sarkisian – aka Cher – was going to publish a two-part memoir, said Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Times. While a president can get away with such a "power move", it seems less justifiable for a pop star "who once sang 'The Shoop Shoop Song'". Yet it turns out that Cher has led such an eventful life that two volumes may not be enough. She was born in California in 1946, to a heroin-addicted Armenian father and a singer mother who married eight times, said Barbara Ellen in The Observer. While much of her childhood was spent in chaotic poverty, there were periods of "wealth and plenty", depending on whom her mother was "married to at the time". Cher met her first husband, Sonny Bono, a songwriter 11 years her senior, in a coffee shop when she was 16. When he walked in, she recalls, "everyone else in the room faded". Having worked together as backing singers, they formed the singing duo Sonny & Cher, and in 1965 hit the big time with their "deathless global smash" "I Got You Babe", which knocked The Beatles' "Help!" off the top of the UK charts.

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While Cher and Sonny had a "sizzling chemistry in performance", offstage he was an "old-fashioned, controlling" Svengali, said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times. A fan of Machiavelli, he worked Cher "like a pack mule" while saddling her with contracts that gave him ownership of 95% of her earnings (the remaining 5% went to lawyers). The pair reinvented themselves as TV stars in the early 1970s, making the hugely successful "The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour", but divorced in 1975. Covering the period up to the dawn of Cher's "serious movie career in the early 1980s", "The Memoir: Part One" is a "detailed and characteristically profane" examination of a fascinating and remarkable life.

Clarissa, Muse to Power by Hugo Vickers

This "affectionate, crisp and gossipy biography" captures a "lost world", said Ysenda Maxtone Graham in The Times. Its subject is Clarissa Eden – wife of Sir Anthony Eden – who lived a long life (she died, aged 101, in 2021), and a mostly "very jolly" one. The niece of Winston Churchill, she studied at the Slade and Oxford, and in her 20s had a rather "floating-about existence", as she flitted between various jobs (one at Chatham House, another at Vogue) and attended lots of parties. For nine years, she had a secret affair with a "civilised and cultured Viennese married man", but broke this off in 1952 to marry the 55-year-old Anthony Eden, then foreign secretary. Their marriage was childless, and was dominated by his workaholic tendencies, which became even more marked once he succeeded Winston Churchill as PM in 1955. Yet their time in No. 10 was shortlived: Eden's poor health – exacerbated by the Suez Crisis – forced him to resign in January 1957.

After that, Clarissa reported feeling "free at last", said Lynn Barber in The Daily Telegraph. "The couple spent much of their retirement on cruises – once with John Prescott as their cabin steward – interspersed with trips to Boston for Eden's medical treatment, first for his gallbladder, then for prostate cancer." Eden died in 1977, and Vickers paints Clarissa as "quite a merry widow": she travelled widely, made new friends – including Lucian Freud and Barry Humphries – and was still "gadding about" in her early 90s.

Many people found her "abrupt and chilly", said John Jolliffe in The Spectator. But Vickers – a friend for several decades – persuades us that she was "valued company" to her friends, and a devoted wife. He has drawn on his "wide knowledge of Clarissa's world" to produce an "unfailingly readable" biography.

Reagan by Max Boot

"A second-class mind but a first-class temperament." That was how a Supreme Court judge characterised Franklin D. Roosevelt. For Max Boot, the author of this "enormously readable" biography, the words apply too to Ronald Reagan, said Dominic Sandbrook in The Sunday Times. The actor-turned-politician, who "led the US for eight years after 1981", is shown to have been consistently underestimated by his critics, who wrongly assumed his showbusiness past to be a sign of "fundamental mendacity and unseriousness". On the contrary, Boot argues, the "Gipper" was an effective governor of California, and then a generally shrewd and emotionally intelligent president. Yet Boot doesn't overlook what he calls Reagan's "dark side" – shown, for instance, in his handling of the Aids pandemic, where his "ignorance" contributed to thousands of deaths. "Scrupulously honest" and impeccably researched, Reagan is a compelling portrait of a "complicated, frustrating, yet oddly magnetic man".

Born in 1911, Reagan grew up in "straitened circumstances" in rural Illinois, said Philip Johnston in The Daily Telegraph. His father was a travelling salesman with alcoholic tendencies, his mother a pious housewife with a taste for amateur dramatics. This upbringing, Boot suggests, gave Reagan both his insularity and "strong sense of right and wrong". Although not academically gifted, Reagan developed into a "handsome and well-built young man", and became a radio sports announcer in the 1920s – just as the medium was taking off – and then broke into Hollywood in the mid-1930s. After his first marriage, to Jane Wyman, foundered, he married fellow actress Nancy Davis in 1952.

A "New Deal Democrat" in early adulthood, Reagan became increasingly preoccupied by the "Red Peril" and joined the Republicans in the 1950s, said Andrew Preston in Literary Review. Before entering politics, he "honed his communications skills" by working as a spokesman for General Electric – a role that involved "criss-crossing the country", speaking to ordinary people. As a politician, Boot argues, Reagan was more of a pragmatist than is generally realised. Despite his warnings about the "twin evils of big government at home and communism abroad", he "signed off more tax rises than tax cuts" as president, and negotiated "amicably and productively with Mikhail Gorbachev". Providing a "much-needed corrective" to the idea that Reagan was "ideologically consistent and political unbending", Boot's book is "intelligent, elegant and engrossing".

A Woman Like Me by Diane Abbott

There have always been "two sides" to Diane Abbott, said Rachel Sylvester in The Times. A fearless and "rather fun" trailblazer, she is also an "unreconstructed left-winger" who can be "self-righteous, predictable and factional". And both sides are on display in her memoir, "A Woman Like Me". Take the chapters dealing with Jeremy Corbyn, who was her boyfriend in the late 1970s. She's "funny and candid about their relationship" – there's an amusing account of a camping holiday in France, during which he insisted on travelling on a rickety East German motorbike, and of the date he took her on to Karl Marx's tomb. But she is "less willing to face up" to his flaws as a politician; she still regards the furore about antisemitism in the Labour Party as a "conspiracy" by his enemies.

Yet Abbott's resilience is "astonishing", said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. Her teachers thought a "working-class black girl wouldn't get into Cambridge". She proved them wrong. She suffered years of abuse and battled many rejections to become the UK's first black female MP, and was "triumphantly reelected" this year – "despite Keir Starmer's best efforts". Whatever you think of her, Abbott's story is fascinating. This is a "rich, complex memoir".

Wild Thing by Sue Prideaux

The biographer Sue Prideaux has a track record of rehabilitating "19th century enfants terribles", said Nikhil Krishnan in The Daily Telegraph. "I Am Dynamite!", her "highly entertaining" 2018 life of Nietzsche, took pains to prove that the philosopher was no antisemite. She has also penned sympathetic biographies of Strindberg and Munch. In her latest work, she offers an "equally stout defence" of the French painter Paul Gauguin – today widely regarded as an "adulterous imperialist" who "spread syphilis" to teenage girls on Tahiti. While admitting that Gauguin was not "exactly a saint", Prideaux stresses that he was no "ideologue" of empire: he consistently decried French policies in Tahiti, and defended the indigenous culture of Polynesia. Nor is there any evidence that he had syphilis. In challenging the stereotypes, Prideaux has performed a valuable service – even if not everyone will be convinced by her claims about "Gauguin's goodness".

His life was certainly "remarkable and varied", said Stephen Smith in Literary Review. Born in Paris in 1848, Gauguin spent part of his childhood in Peru (his mother being descended from a wealthy family there) and would tell people: "I am a savage from Peru". Despite performing poorly at school, he became "filthy rich" in his 20s as a trader on the Paris Bourse. In 1873, he married Mette-Sophie Gad, from a "respectable" Danish family, and they had five children. At first, painting was a hobby; but it became his main means of supporting himself after he lost his job in the 1882 stock market crash.

Telling his wife he needed to give free rein to the "savage" side of his nature, Gauguin left his family and moved to Brittany in 1886, said Tim Adams in The Observer. The following year, he travelled to Panama and the Caribbean (briefly working as a labourer on the Panama Canal) and, in 1888, he stayed with Vincent van Gogh in Arles – an "insane and creative" nine-week period that culminated in van Gogh cutting off his ear.

In 1891, Gauguin departed for Tahiti, said Nadia Beard in the Financial Times. Most of the remaining 12 years of his life were spent either there or in the Marquesas Islands. Polynesia, while not the paradise he'd expected, enabled him to find a "new artistic language, one that would pave the way for Henri Matisse and others". The paintings he completed – often of semi-naked island girls – cemented his status as a great artist. Prideaux's impressively balanced book fleshes Gauguin out "with nuance and detail". It is a "scintillating" achievement.

Billionaire, Nerd, Saviour, King by Anupreeta Das

Entrepreneurial genius? Aggressive monopolist? Major philanthropist? As the title of this book suggests, people have a range of takes on Bill Gates, said Nicole Kobie in The Times. The Microsoft co-founder was the original nerd-turned-billionaire – the "classic model" who paved the way for the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Once famed for his ruthlessness, Gates reinvented himself as a global philanthropist after Microsoft's alleged monopolistic practices landed the company in legal difficulty, and for six straight years YouGov polls found him to be the world's "most admired" man.

More recently, however, revelations about his ties to the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein – as well as his extra-marital affairs – have tarnished his reputation. In her well-researched and entertaining book, the New York Times journalist Anupreeta Das charts these "ups and downs" while using her subject to reflect on the "hidden influence of billionaires". Full of "intriguing titbits" – from Gates's love of fast cars to his "cringeworthy" pursuit of female employees – it "makes for compelling reading".

As Das delves into different facets of Gates's life, "eye-opening" details emerge, said The Economist. Gates, we learn, is the biggest private owner of farmland in America. The charitable foundation he started with his ex-wife Melinda outspends many governments – and even the WHO; this enables it to shape health policy in many countries, yet it is "accountable to no one". But the book has a major flaw: Gates never really comes alive as a person (he declined to be interviewed for it). Das's narrative has a "Gates-shaped hole" at its centre.

It also struck me as overly critical, said Felix Salmon in The Washington Post. Whatever his personal failings, there is surely a "lot to commend about Gates". Yet you won't read much in this book about the way he translated his ambitious vision of "a computer on every desk" into reality, or the key role he has played in the "spectacularly successful fight" against diseases such as HIV/Aids and malaria. Instead, the book "often reads like an extended list of all the major and minor complaints Das could find"; and not just about Gates, but about billionaires, nerds and philanthropists more generally.

Still, it does raise important questions, said Richard Waters in the Financial Times – about the growing chasm between the richest and the rest, and the moral demands we can make of those who use their wealth to do good. Even if it is not the final word on Gates, this book adds to our "understanding of the man".

The House of Beckham by Tom Bower

If you judged David and Victoria Beckham from their Instagram posts, you'd assume that theirs is a "love story for the ages", said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. In countless shots taken at home or on holiday, they gaze adoringly into each other's eyes, seemingly as loved-up as they were 25 years ago, when they were married in "matching outfits of Ribena purple". Or they're surrounded by their four children, looking like a close-knit clan.

Yet according to Tom Bower's "The House of Beckham", this "happy-families image" is pure fabrication, said Hannah Betts in the same paper. Bower, a veteran biographer, portrays their relationship as a "devil's bargain", designed to prop up their staggeringly profitable global brand. Posh and Becks, he says, don't actually like each other very much, and as individuals they leave a lot to be desired: "David is stingy, squeaky-voiced and volatile. Victoria is a tuneless, furious-faced WAG whose fashion line is a much-puffed vanity project." While Bower scores highly "in terms of research and truth-telling", he struggles to get past the "ghastliness of his subjects"; the narrative is "oddly flat".

There's little in this book that's revelatory, said Camilla Long in The Sunday Times: mostly, it's "culled from available records". Yet the details are still "kind of gripping", from David's multiple alleged affairs – he emerges as a "shagging automaton" – to the many ways in which the Beckhams are money-obsessed: neither apparently likes tipping in restaurants, and every business decision David has ever made can, it seems, "be traced back to his desire to avoid tax". No less entertaining are his "superhuman" efforts to get a knighthood. "Unappreciative c**ts," he thundered, when the honours committee turned him down. "His leaked emails will simply never get old."

The Beckhams are certainly shielded by a "staggeringly slick" PR operation, said Katie Rosseinsky in The Independent. Yet Bower's efforts to pierce it are not terribly effective. This is an underwhelming and "overly long tome", which rehashes stereotypes that have always existed in the media – David as airhead, Victoria as "thin and miserable". By the end, the couple "seem no more real" than they did at the book's start. All the real details about David's affairs are 20 years old, said Zoe Williams in The Guardian. Beyond that, Bower relies on insinuation: David "appeared to be smitten" by an aristocratic party girl, or "attracted the attention of a glamorous Australian bikini model". It's not so much a take-down, as an "epic symphony of snide".

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The Diaries of Franz Kafka

When Franz Kafka's diaries were first published soon after his death, aged 40, in 1924, they were heavily polished by his friend Max Brod, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. Brod – who'd ignored Kafka's instruction to burn all his manuscripts – set out to turn him into a saintly figure, untouched by "human impulses". He cut out anything remotely sexual (including his visits to prostitutes) and excised anything else he judged extraneous – including the letters, draft stories, dreams and aphorisms that Kafka had "stuffed" into his diaries. Now, more than 30 years after they appeared in Germany, the unexpurgated diaries have finally been published in English, sensitively translated by Ross Benjamin. And they're a "revelation".

Apart from anything else, this new edition is "a lot funnier than Brod's version", said Morten Høi Jensen in Literary Review. We see Kafka noticing that a fellow train passenger's "sizeable member makes a large bulge in his pants", and commenting on a friend's pornography collection. But more valuable still is the restoration of the "open-endedness" of the original text. Kafka's diaries were really closer to notebooks: they were, Benjamin notes, a "laboratory" for his fiction – and now we can peer into that laboratory, seeing how the themes of his writing (alienation and loss, futility and repetition) "grew out of his circumscribed life".

At times Kafka cuts a surprisingly ordinary figure, said Chris Power in The Guardian. We see him off to the theatre, or "watching a ski-jumping competition" – though at other times he expresses "profound loneliness and isolation". He emerges not just as the tortured genius he is known as now, but also as a "youngish man finding his way, hungry for experience and inspiration" – and the contradiction between the two "brings him closer to us".

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Me and Mr Jones by Suzi Ronson

In 1971, Suzi Ronson (then Suzanne Fussey) was a 21-year-old hairdresser at a salon in Beckenham, southeast London, when one of her customers – Mrs Jones – mentioned her "artistic" son David, said Anthony Quinn in The Observer. The next week, Mrs Jones brought in David's wife, Angie, who was so delighted with the "outrageous" haircut Suzi gave her that she took her to meet David himself – "a pale and epicene young man" who had just started calling himself David Bowie. With the help of a German anti-dandruff product, Suzi transformed David's "mousy" hair into a "spiky red feather cut". It was the birth of the "look of Ziggy Stardust".

Suzi, infatuated with the couple and their bohemian world, became Bowie's stylist, and soon after went on the road with him and the Spiders from Mars. Five decades on, she has written an "honest and troubled memoir" of her time as his "hair'n'make-up mascot". It belongs to a niche genre – call it "I-was-Sinatra's-valet" – but her book offers a compelling portrait of Bowie "on the verge of stardom".

Ronson skilfully charts her drab suburban upbringing, so different from Bowie's "countercultural" mileu, said Deborah Levy in Literary Review. With "perfect pitch and tension", she recounts key moments in his early career – from his legendary performance of Starman on Top of the Pops in 1972 to the night a year later when he unexpectedly "retired" Ziggy Stardust.

Her book makes a refreshing change from the hagiographic tone of most Bowie biographies, said John Aizlewood on iNews. Here, "the star emerges as cold": he sacks his drummer on his wedding day, and expects Suzi to procure him an "endless supply of young girls and boys". Suzi herself is soon "cut adrift", at which point she marries the guitarist Mick Ronson, who had also been ditched by Bowie. After that, the book loses its dynamism.

Much Bowie literature consists of "pretentious evaluation" of his lyrics and influences, said Suzanne Moore in The New Statesman. Ronson, by contrast, barely mentions his music, and instead focuses on practical matters – such as sewing the jewels onto Bowie's jockstrap, or worrying "about all the sweat breaking the zips of his costumes". She tells us that she slept with him once, but is "discreet" about the details. It makes for an engaging, often endearing account of the "magical rising of Ziggy, by the woman who put the colour in his hair".

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Byron: A Life in Ten Letters by Andrew Stauffer

"Mad, bad and dangerous to know" was how Lady Caroline Lamb famously characterised Lord Byron. It's a fair description, in many ways, said John Banville in The Guardian. But George Gordon, the 6th Baron Byron, "must also have been, at the simplest level, wonderful company". He didn't take himself too seriously, and his lust for life was immense: "I shall not live long," he wrote to his publisher John Murray in 1819, "& for that reason I must live while I can." In Byron: A Life in Ten Letters, Andrew Stauffer uses Bryon's "vivid and hugely entertaining letters" as a series of entry points into his tempestuous life. Each chapter begins with an extract from a letter; Stauffer then discusses the context that inspired it. It is an impressively "rounded portrait, venereal scars and all, of one of the prime movers of the Romantic movement".

Stauffer concedes that his approach is not particularly original, said D.J. Taylor in The Wall Street Journal: fragmented biographies are in vogue. "But there is something about Byron's headlong scamper about the world of his day that lends itself to this miniaturist treatment". We first see him as a Cambridge undergraduate, "planning endless bachelor parties"; then en route to Greece in 1810, where he swims the Hellespont with his friend Lt William Ekenhead; and later writing ghost stories on Lake Geneva with Percy and Mary Shelley. "The letters are practically Messianic in their intensity, aflame with relish for the incidental scenery or the women Byron is pursuing." It's a wonder, given the pace at which he lived his 36 years, that Byron had any time for serious writing.

The poet depicted in these pages often emerges as a "cold-hearted shit", said John Walsh in The Sunday Times. During his short-lived marriage to Annabella Milbanke – a "brilliant mathematician with a strong moral centre" – he installed his half-sister Augusta Leigh at their Piccadilly home, and "made the women compete with each other in caressing him". The night his wife gave birth, he "sat in the empty drawing room below, throwing empty bottles at the ceiling". In time, polite opinion turned against him, and he left England, never to return. Stauffer sometimes brings an incongruously "21st century perspective to 19th century behaviour": he describes Byron as a "sex tourist in Italy", and talks of Shelley's bisexual experiences as "polyamory". But no matter. This is a "devilishly readable book", which brings Regency England to "howling life", and its "disgraceful but irresistible subject into dazzling focus".

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Keir Starmer: The Biography by Tom Baldwin

Although Keir Starmer is almost certain to be our next prime minister, he remains an "oddly elusive" figure, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. People often complain that they don't really know what he stands for, and he talks about personal matters somewhat stiffly, as if holding something back. All this makes a book such as Keir Starmer: The Biography feel long overdue. Tom Baldwin is a former journalist who worked for five years as a Labour spin doctor; he was originally recruited to ghostwrite Starmer's own memoir, but Starmer backed out of the project last year, agreeing instead to cooperate on this biography. The result, while not exactly revelatory – Baldwin warns that his pages won't be "spattered with blood" – does a job that "very precisely mirrors its subject": it is careful, nuanced and eminently capable. "It is, in short, as intimate an insight into Britain's likely next prime minister as readers are probably going to get."

The most interesting chapters concern Starmer's "difficult early life", said Robert Shrimsley in the FT. Starmer grew up in a cramped semi in Surrey with a "seriously ill mother", Jo (she had Still's disease); a "cold, difficult" father, Rodney (a toolmaker); and three siblings (one of whom, Nick, has learning difficulties). Television was banned in the Starmer household, the "radio played only Beethoven or Shostakovich", and Rodney "barracked and bullied" visiting schoolfriends, said Patrick Maguire in The Times. Although Starmer was the only one of the siblings to go to grammar school and university, and then became a leading barrister, his dad never once told him he made him proud. Only after his death in 2018 did Starmer find out this wasn't "the full story": hidden in his father's wardrobe was a "scrapbook of every newspaper story about his son".

Many politicians pose as regular people, but Starmer emerges from this as someone who really is quite ordinary, said Matthew d'Ancona in the Evening Standard. He is happiest spending time with his family, or organising weekend eight-a-side football games. As his deputy, Angela Rayner, puts it: he is "the least political person I know in politics". The "one nagging question" is how much Baldwin's political sympathies have coloured his portrait, said Ben Riley-Smith in The Daily Telegraph. Had he discovered "less laudable aspects of Sir Keir's story", would he have "forensically interrogated" them? This may not, then, quite be a definitive biography – but it is engaging and "skilfully done".

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The Woman in Me by Britney Spears

In January 2008 – 11 months after the notorious occasion when she shaved off her own hair in a Los Angeles salon – Britney Spears was asked by her parents to meet them at their beach house, said Anna Leszkiewicz in The New Statesman. "There she was ambushed by police and taken to hospital against her will." A month later, the state of California placed the pop star under a "conservatorship" – a legal arrangement giving her father, Jamie, full control of her finances and personal life. For the next 13 years, Spears was "told what to eat, what medication to take, when she could see her children", even when she could and couldn't use the lavatory. Meanwhile, her father "paid himself a $6m salary" from the proceeds of her endless concerts and recordings. It's no surprise, in the circumstances, that Spears's memoir reads "like a dark fairy tale". Powerful and compellingly candid, it tells of how a "young girl, both adored and vilified for her beauty, talent and fame", was effectively "imprisoned" by her jealous and avaricious family.

The truth, of course, is that Spears had always been controlled and infantilised, said Neil McCormick in The Daily Telegraph. She became a "people-pleasing child performer" at a young age, supporting her family by appearing in theatrical musicals. Aged 16, male music executives moulded her into "America's teen pop princess" – and soon she was being taken advantage of by "narcissistic self-serving boyfriends", and "hounded by paparazzi". When she rebelled against her "powerlessness", her sanity was called into question – a process she "specifically likens to a witch trial". Her memoir, written without self-pity, is gripping and "forensically convincing". Finally, we know what it feels like to be the "madwoman in the attic of pop".

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Marcia Williams by Linda McDougall

"Imagine a story of sex, drugs and secrets inside Downing Street. A story of a political wife accused of meddling, and a resignation honours list mired in scandal," said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. But no, it's not the one you're imagining: this biography by Linda McDougall tells the "irresistible tale" of Marcia Williams, political secretary and "office wife" to Labour PM Harold Wilson. Baroness Falkender, as she became in 1974, was one of the most controversial and vilified political figures of the 1960s and 1970s. According to many, she was a "hysterical tyrant" with a "dark hold" over Wilson. McDougall offers a more nuanced portrait. Without ignoring Williams's flaws, she outlines the strains she must have been under, as a high-achieving woman with a troubled personal life living in rampantly sexist times. Her Williams, while "no heroine", is "fascinating".

Williams, the daughter of a Northamptonshire builder, first met Wilson in the mid-1950s, when she became a secretary at Labour HQ, said Frances Wilson in The Daily Telegraph. She began sending the then-shadow chancellor anonymous letters, alerting him to machinations within the party. She soon became Wilson's private secretary – at which point, McDougall admits, they probably had a brief affair. (She later allegedly told Wilson's wife, Mary: "I went to bed with your husband six times in 1956 and it wasn't satisfactory.") In 1964, when Wilson became PM, he appointed Williams his political secretary, a newly created role that made her one of Britain's first unelected political advisers. She stayed in it when Wilson lost power in 1970, and went with him back to Downing Street when he regained it in 1974.

It was then that Private Eye revealed that "Lady Forkbender" had a shocking secret, said Anne de Courcy in The Spectator. In 1968 and 1969, Williams had given birth to two children – the result of an affair with political journalist Walter Terry. The births had been hushed up; Williams concealed her pregnancies by wearing a baggy coat at work. Amid a public outcry, McDougall suggests, Williams resorted to taking amphetamine pills and Valium, "prescribed by Wilson's doctor", which contributed to the "hysterical outbursts" for which she became known. Further scandal followed in 1976, when it was revealed that Williams had hand-written Wilson's controversial resignation honours list (dubbed the "Lavender List") on a sheet of lilac paper. McDougall's sympathetic book is a "gripping" portrait both of an "extraordinary woman", and of the "emotional dynamics of Downing Street".

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Lou Reed: The King of New York by Will Hermes

Lou Reed, the lead vocalist of the Velvet Underground, who died in 2013, already has a longish shelf of biographies. This one is the first to make use of his personal archive, "and it shows", said David Keenan in Literary Review. "It feels more like a coolly researched biography than one written by a passionate fan." What's more, Will Hermes tries to repackage the "violently aggressive, drug-huffing", gender-bending, "sexually unhinged" rock star to make him acceptable to the modern world: Reed and his circle were "nonbinary", Hermes informs us; he suggests that Reed was a troubled person who tried to become "someone good" (as he wrote in one of his best-loved songs, Perfect Day), not the sociopath that his behaviour suggested. The result is an "awkward love letter to the 20th century", but "the perfect biography of Lou Reed for 2023": a defensive depiction of a man whose stock in trade was "all that was difficult and dark and destructive in what it is to be human".

It's "the only Lou Reed bio you need to read", said Stephen Metcalf in The Washington Post. It's really two biographies: one of Lewis Allan Reed, the sensitive, middle-class, midcentury music fan; and one of the louche, sardonic, drug-addled persona he invented and inhabited. From Reed's early days with Andy Warhol to his breakthrough as a solo star, with a little help from David Bowie, it's all there, written up with a judicious blend of "love and scepticism". Hermes doesn't conceal the evidence that Reed became a pampered celeb who could be as obnoxious to waiters as he was to journalists. But he's good on Reed's "musically confrontational" yet "unabashedly romantic" songwriting. The book gets the balance between the person and the poseur "exactly right".

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