Michael Dirda of the Washington Post reviews The World Is What It Is, Patrick French’s biography of V. S. Naipaul.

. . .according to French and such one-time friends as Paul Theroux, the young Vidia really could be humorous and charming, and he seems to have been the indulged pet of the English literary and social establishment. On his travels, surprisingly, Naipaul also shows a rare ability to win the confidence and help of other people — not that he is a person one could ever actually trust.

“My policy is as radical…as the constitution,” said FDR during the 1932 election campaign when he was accused of wanting to nationalise the utilities.

The Economist reviews H. W. Brands’s biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

More aspects of Rimbaud are known than can be assimilated: his vastly various, influential and innovative poetry itself; his expressive letters; his scornful and unhesitating permanent abandonment of poetry at the age of 20; the anecdotes of his contemporaries showing him as a drunken, filthy, amoral homosexualteenager who becomes a reserved, hard-working, responsible and respectable (if misanthropic and disgust-ridden) adult merchant and explorer.

The New York Times has Richard Hell’s review of Edmund White’s Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel.

In the Guardian, Alasdair Gray reacts to reading his biography.

However you choose to tell it, it’s an extraordinary American family story, stretching from the 1820s to World War I. First there’s the pioneering tale of the founding grandfather, William, an Ulster immigrant and self-made Albany businessman. Then, the eccentric and domineering personality of Henry James Sr., high-minded, spiritually questing, unemployed, nomadic, scarred by the amputation of his leg in childhood, his “inward demons” and his breakdown in his 30s (or, in the Swedenborgian terms he adopted, his “vastation”). . . .

In the New York Times, Hermione Lee reviews Paul Fisher’s House of Wits, a collective biography of the James family.

Or perhaps, also like me, my uncle hoped that if one day he did manage to read Needham’s epic from start to finish, he would learn the answer to the famous “Needham question”: How did it come to pass that a civilization with such an astounding history of inventiveness and scholarship and intellectual curiosity failed to make the leap into the modern world of science? Where did China go wrong? Why did the industrial revolution take off in Europe, and not China?

Writing for Salon, Andrew Leonard reviews Simon Winchester’s biography of Joseph Needham, The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom. Winchester (or his publisher) certainly should have stopped directly before the colon.

The Wilson Quarterly has an article by Ross Terrill, author of Mao: A Biography, on the willingness of modern Chinese to embrace Mao the cultural icon and forget Mao the totalitarian.

The New York Times is carrying the first chapter of Randall Woods’s new biography of Lyndon B. Johnson.