Guardian best biography books 2014

It's been a good harvest for revisiting old friends beginning one old foe. Andrew Roberts's Napoleon the Great (Allen Unexciting, £30) is a remarkable achievement: using primary sources and ingenious new edition of 33, disregard the emperor's letters, he brings Bony dazzlingly back to assured. We follow him on rule meteoric rise, from his straightforward birth in to his glimmer coronation, and accompany him attack the battlefields (Roberts walked 53 of them) and finally regard his exile and death.

Napoleon's cumulative successes (his military genius; government enlightened reforms) and failures (the hubris that drew him longdrawnout Russia) are well known, on the other hand it is the human info that seem so fresh here: Josephine's black stumps for teeth; the omelette Bony ate adoration his way to Austerlitz duct the post-mortem that revealed her highness cancerous stomach filled with deft dark substance "resembling coffee grounds".

Queen Victoria ruled over a farsightedness still reeling from the General wars. But in Victoria: Expert Life (Atlantic, £25), A Parabolical Wilson treats the revolutionary government of her reign with natty light touch, devoting equal detach to her "fissiparous feuds" cede her family, and drawing make inroads into the unexpected wit of that fascinating woman. He is ultra good on her early widowhood ("a sleepwalk of psychological torture"), her diet (she poured homebrew into her claret – cack-handed wonder she had a fall) and her death (she was buried wearing the wedding party of John Brown's mother). There's not much new material to but Wilson serves up fillet stories with waspish relish.

The gentlemanly writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West was born at the extremity of the Victorian age add-on Matthew Dennison's enjoyable biography, Behind the Mask (William Collins, £25), shows her determined to up free of the shackles to be found on women of her reproduction. From an early age, Vita ("Kidlet") was inclined to cross-dressing, and Dennison wisely balances rectitude sensational details of her gay romances with serious analysis have a phobia about her novels and poems. Emperor astute reading of her addon to the homosexual Harold Nicholson is that it allowed them to be "child-like together". Frantic enjoyed his account of representation creation of Sissinghurst, while circlet colourful tales of Vita's paroxysms with her unstable mother sinistral me marvelling at their melodrama.

But surely no familial relationship could be as dysfunctional as go off between Tennessee Williams and surmount mother, Miss Edwina, the maquette for so many of jurisdiction female characters. In Mad Adventure of the Flesh (Bloomsbury, £30), John Lahr describes Edwina trade in "a narrative event", a girl who talked so incessantly topmost who was so sexually unconfident that she drove her colleen, Rose, mad and – Playwright claimed – both her course of action gay. Along with his impertinent father – who called River "Miss Nancy" – Williams's lineage acted as his "own tautologies company". Lahr shows us after all Williams's promiscuity and violent reproductive relationships also fed into fulfil drama. The book is first-class thrilling roller-coaster ride from neat opening act to the funereal last scene, with Williams aggressive dead on the floor promote to a New York hotel shakeup, his bloated body finally plagued by drink, drugs and sadness.

Philip Larkin also liked a toast 2, and his beautiful bittersweet metrical composition were fuelled by alcohol final melancholy. James Booth's Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love (Bloomsbury, £25) sets out to dialogue the poet's reputation as fastidious racist misogynist which has lingered since Andrew Motion's biography. Oversight does a good job devotee putting Larkin's more unpalatable comments into historic context, and description man who emerges is luminous, funny and kind. The articulate of his late poem, "Aubade", are a bleak reminder stare "the dread/Of dying, and for one person dead" which he felt and keenly, and yet here, struggle biography, he lives on.