Biography & memoir

DAM BUSTER BARNES WALLIS: AN ENGINEER’S LIFE RICHARD MORRIS

Weidenfeld&Nicolson, 520pp, £28

Boffins, as they used to be called, helped us win the last war. Think of Alan Turing, who broke the Enigma code, or Professor R.V. Jones, the Air Defence wizard. But for those of us for whom the Dam Busters’ March is as evocative as Proust’s madeleine, the palm must go to Sir Barnes Wallace, inventor of ‘Upkeep’. the bouncing bomb. Little did we know that Upkeep was initially dismissed as ‘tripe’ by Bomber Command’s curt supremo, Sir Arthur Harris.

This is one of the many fascinating details to emerge from Richard Morris’s biography. In the words of the historian James Holland, author of an acclaimed account of the famous dam buster raid itself, ‘Morris skilfully picks through the myths, the legend, and the ever-evolving narrative to put flesh back on the bones of an unquestionably brilliant, but also highly complex, figure.’

In the Daily Telegraph, Saul David described Wallis as ‘a complicated man who combined Victorian cultural conservatism with implicit faith in technology and an “organic AngloBritish nation”’. David said Wallis’s devotion to his ‘cold, controlling and needy mother was something of a mystery.’ He thought ‘an Oedipus complex’ surely explained Wallis’s ‘awkwardness with the opposite sex’ until, aged 35, he fell for and later married his teenage cousin-in-law.

In the Observer, Alexander Larman welcomed this biography because ‘Wallis was in the unenviable position of being one of Britain’s most talented engineers who was nevertheless under-appreciated in his lifetime and since, wartime efforts aside.’ Morris, said Larman, ‘does a sterling job of re-establishing his reputation as an innovator in countless fields, in highly readable fashion.’

The Marriage Question

GEORGE ELIOT’S DOUBLE LIFE CLARE CARLISLE

Allen Lane, 372pp, £25

Declared a genius by her literary critics and a pariah by society for living for 25 years with George Lewes, a man not divorced from his wife, Eliot considered herself ‘married’, though not in the conventional sense.

Jane O’Grady in the TLS described the book as ‘fascinating and scholarly’ and Marina Benjamin in Prospect as ‘a richly textured and absorbing biographical study’. Rupert Christiansen in the Telegraph felt ‘it doesn’t add any facts or documents to existing accounts.’ Kathy O’ Shaughnessy in the Financial Times disagreed, calling it ‘a splendid addition to the Eliot biographical canon.’

‘Carlisle’s magisterial book has many facets to it: biographical, philosophical, literary,’ she continued. ‘Carlisle takes the reader into fascinating territory with the doubleness of Eliot’s life. “At once inside marriage and outside its conventions”, Eliot was perfectly pitched to write about it.’

‘In her scholarly and thoughtful new book, the philosopher Clare Carlisle does something a little bit daring: she suggests that Eliot and Lewes’ relationship was not perfect after all … it was an image that the couple cultivated deliberately to prove their critics wrong,’ Susie Goldsborough opined in the Times ‘Eliot’s novels do not exactly overflow with happy marriages. Was this a blast against ‘the moralism that condemned their author, by smashing the facade of respectable marriage, Carlisle wondered, or are they a hint about Eliot’s own relationship?’

Describing the book as ‘thrilling’, Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian noted that Eliot was ‘the richest self-made woman in the country’, but no feminist, she was content that all her earnings went into Lewes’ bank account. Was Lewes, her capable manager, perhaps, a little too controlling?

Paradise Now The Extraordinary Life Of Karl Lagerfeld

WILLIAM MIDDLETON

Ebury Press, 470pp, £25

The fashion designer who revived Chanel and was the creative director of two other major brands, Fendi and Lagerfeld, also led a mysterious personal life. Indeed, his one serious relationship was with Jacques de Bascher, who died from Aids in 1989. ‘Was his and de Bascher’s relationship really celibate, as Lagerfeld claimed?’ asked Hadley Freeman in her review for the Sunday Times. ‘And was he sleeping with the beautiful young men he collected in his later years?’ Freeman acknowledged that this is ‘a deeply researched book, written by someone with a fondness for Lagerfeld, and although I came away from it not knowing the designer as well as I would have liked, I did end up liking him more than I had expected.’ In her Times review Hilary Rose, found ‘much to enjoy’ in this book about someone who was ‘an influencer long before the internet, a chameleon who constantly reinvented himself and his surroundings, and a man with a talent for both friendship and enmity’, as well as ‘a top notch party planner’. Observer reviewer Rachel Cooke found that the more she read about Lagerfeld’s frenetic activity, ‘the stronger the whiff of loneliness grows. .’ Duncan Fallowell, in the Spectator, emphasised Lagerfeld’s evanescent quality: ‘When