Miss Shirley Bassey by John L Williams | Book review

A biography of Shirley Bassey makes John O'Connell uneasyMost of the time, debate about the function of biography is marked by woolly but polite consensus. Then, every few years, a book is published which shifts that debate up a gear. It might be a particularly vicious example of the form, such as Roger Lewis's life of Anthony Burgess, or one where there's been an obvious tug of war for control of the narrative, such as Anne Stevenson's Sylvia Plath biography Bitter Fame. Or it might be one that...

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