Lucasta Miller’s biography of a largely forgotten 19th-century writer captures the fickle nature of fame

Books on what Socrates was like as a young man, and why the truths can still be found in tragedy

A stirring biography of one of the greatest chroniclers of the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism

Kurt Campbell on why Richard Holbrooke, architect of the Dayton peace accord, was haunted by Vietnam

History and investigative journalism fuse in a book that speaks beautifully about the effect of simply refusing to speak

Clare Carlisle’s tale of the father of existentialism brings to life his ideas and exposes his restless and troubled life

Ursula Buchan explores the life of her grandfather, a workaholic, wartime propagandist and social climber

A rediscovered memoir of life caught between empire and revolution

Owen Matthews delves into KGB archives for Richard Sorge’s dramatic story

Veteran diplomat William Burns details shifts under five presidents in ‘The Back Channel’

A barbed indictment of class injustice from the young French author of ‘The End of Eddy’

‘Out of the Gobi’ recalls a harrowing time in China’s recent history

Long reviled as a toady of the Soviet regime, the writer is due for a reappraisal of his reputation

An unsparing account of an unwanted pregnancy and working-class reality

Richard J Evans’s biography portrays a man who enthralled readers but remained controversial to the end

The Everything But The Girl frontwoman’s prose sings with musicality in a memoir of her teenage years

The former first lady is on a book tour that looks more like a series of sellout concerts

George Szirtes’s memoir of his mother is a monumental tale of torture and survival

Two disturbing books that explore the pathways to moral bankruptcy are reminders of how even liberal societies can lose their way

Richard Bassett’s memoir of Trieste, Vienna and Prague recalls the charms of a lost world

An exemplary biography of one of America’s most unusual writers grounds the novel in his own literary awakening

New biography Mr Five Per Cent by Jonathan Conlin explores the many lives of one of the world’s richest men

The first major biography casts new light on the man whose art wasn’t valued highly until he was in his seventies

A German soldier-writer’s spellbinding war diary reminds us no one is just a camera

The joys and agonies that fed Kenneth Grahame’s classic are finely told in a biography