Jeffrey Meyers

Leonard Woolf had a logical mind, a lucid style, a rare honesty and a keen eye for cant. He was, after John Maynard Keynes, the most worldly, capable and impressive member of the Bloomsbury Group

The three lives of Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus

How Thomas Mann and Arnold Schoenberg quarreled in the irritable hothouse climate of the Los Angeles émigrés

The second volume of Plath’s Letters begins with great happiness and poetic promise — and ends with the destruction of her marriage and her death

Five wives and out? How Saul Bellow’s turbulent private life informed his novels

The great Impressionist’s series of paintings of Rouen Cathedral prefigures the movies: his eye was the camera, his canvas the screen

Schiele and Soutine both used art to express pathological suffering and confront death

Outsiders, gamblers, brawlers: Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon had a volatile friendship which flourished wildly but ended badly

Hugh Gordon Porteus was a minor but engaging figure in London’s pre-war bohemia 

Five British writers were in Russia in 1917. Each one had his own story, but all were overwhelmed by the powerful tide of history