biography

Paul Wells on Andrew Scheer’s new ‘people-like-me’ (read: not Justin Trudeau) sales pitch and the things he chooses to include in life story

Was he a mad monk? A German spy? The empress’s lover? An unkillable puppetmaster? A Q&A with an author who’s shed new light on who Rasputin really was

By A. Scott Berg

A new biography of Leonard Cohen provides new details on Jimi Hendrix, Phil Spector and Joni Mitchell

Cameron’s laid-back style is suddenly working against him

I am 532 pages into Robert A. Caro’s The Passage Of Power, the fourth installment of what was originally meant to be a three-volume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. Caro is now doing five volumes in all…or at least that’s what he is saying at the moment. A sixth book would not be out of bounds, on the precedent of Dumas Malone’s series on Thomas Jefferson, but five will probably do the trick. Johnson did not have the fascinating, full post-presidential life Jefferson did; he seems to have practically sprinted toward death after he was driven out of the White House.

The Steve Jobs biographer on the Apple founder’s genius, cruelty, obsessions, and indifference to money

On presidents who were failures, the trouble with historians, and how to tell a story

The NDP leader has left a lasting legacy on Canadian politics

Book by Michael Feeney Callan

By Kenneth Slawenski

Plus, a memoir about accidentally killing a cyclist, an exhaustive Paul McCartney bio, an inventive new fantasy novel, the arms race historians forgot, and a commune for therapists