I literally said aloud "Oh my God" when I saw the title and length of this video. Steve, this is a fantastic gift!

what a treasure trove of information

Thank you, Steve! Please make a part 2,3,4 & so on.

Well now I have to grab my Pinot Grigio and popcorn and settle in with a notebook!!!  So looking forward to this.  I love biographies and I know there will be some great recommendations in here to add to my list.

I compiled these into a list. Here they are with rough time stamps - sorry for any mistakes

3:42 Jonathan Eig - [Muhammad] Ali: A Life
4:26 Mark Leopold - Idi Amin The Story of Africa's Icon of Evil
5:24 John Eliot Gardiner - Bach Music in The Castle of Heaven
6:57 Roland Baiton - Here I Stand A Life of Martin Luther
7:11 James Knowlson - Damned to Fame The Life of Samuel Beckett
8:10 Jan Swafford - Beethoven Anguish and Triumph
8:30 Robert Utley - Billy The Kid
9:20 Marie Arana - Bolivar American Liberator
9:50 David J Skal - Something In The Blood [Bram Stoker]
10:30 Serge Bramly - Leonardo The Artist and The Man
11:15 Juliet Barker - The Brontes
11:50 Leslie A Marchand - [Lord] Byron A Portrait
13:10 Robert K Massie - Catherine The Great Portrait of A Woman
14:25 Ronald Hutton - Charles II King of England, Scotland, and Ireland
15:10 John Gardner - The Life and Times of Chaucer
15:49 Brad Gooch - City Poet The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara
17:25 Elaine Showalter - The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe
17:55 Stacy Schiff - Cleopatra A Life
18:55 Natalie Dykstra - Clover Adams A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life
19:50 Michael Schuman - Confucius And The World He Created
20:10 J.C. BeagleHole - The Life of Captain James Cook
20:51 Diarmaid MacCulloch - Thomas Cromwell A Life
22:50 Robert Dallek - Franklin D. Roosevelt A Political Life
23:50 Irving Stone - Clarence Darrow For the Defense
24:50 Janet Browne - Charles Darwin Voyaging
25:50 Leonard S. Marcus - Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom
27:30 Paula R. Backscheider - Daniel Defoe His Life
28:00 Julian Jackson - A Certain Idea of France A Life of Charles De Gaulle
29:40 Peter Ackroyd - [Charles] Dickens
31:01 Andrew S Curran - Diderot The Art of Thinking Freely
31:40 Jonathan Dimbleby - Richard Dimbleby A Biography
33:00 Joseph Frank - Dostoevsky A Writer In His Time
33:45 David W Blight - Frederick Douglass Prophet of Freedom
34:25 James Anderson Winn - John Dryden and His World
35:10 Edward Mendelson - Early Auden, Later Auden
36:20 Arthur D Kahn - The Education of Julius Caesar A Biography A Reconstruction
37:20 Philip Magnus - King Edward The Seventh
38:10 Jurgen Neffe - Einstein A Biography
39:20 Marion Meade - Eleanor of Aquitaine A Biography
39:55 Robert Crawford - Young Eliot , Eliot After The Waste Land
40:40 Robert D Richardson Jr - Emerson The Mind On Fire
41:30 Ali A. Allawi - Faisal I Of Iraq
42:30 P N Furbank - E M Forster A Life
43:20 Robert B Asprey - Frederick The Great The Magnificent Enigma
44:00 Ramachandra Guha - Gandhi The Years that Changed The World 1915-1948
45:00 Norman Sherry - The Life of Graham Greene
46:00 Robert Hendrickson - Hamilton I, Hamilton II
46:30 Brenda Wineapple - Hawthorne A Life
47:50 Carlos Baker - Ernest Hemingway A Life Story
48:30 W L Warren - Henry II
49:40 Francis Hackett - The Personal History of Henry The Eighth
50:25 Walter Isaacson - Steve Jobs
52:20 Robert A Caro - The Years of Lyndon Johnson
54:07 W Jackson Bate - Samuel Johnson
54:50 Richard Ellmann - James Joyce
55:10 Reiner Stach - Kafka
56:30 Theodore C. Sorensen - Kennedy
57:30 William Taubman - Khrushchev The Man and His Era
59:20 Ben Bradlee Jr - The Kid The Immortal Life of Ted Williams
1:00:30 William Manchester - The Last Lion [Churchill]
1:01:35 Gerald Gunther - Learned Hand The Man and the Judge
1:02:50 Roy Blount, Jr. - Robert E Lee
1:03:20 Jeffrey C Stewart - The New Negro The Life of Alain Locke
1:04:30 T Harry Williams - Huey Long
1:05:28 Carol Bundy - The Nature of Sacrifice [Charles Russell Lowell Jr]
1:06:10 Peter Robb - M The Man Who Became Caravaggio
1:07:10 Sebastian De Grazia - Machiavelli In Hell
1:08:07 David Teems - Majestie The King Behind The King James Bible
1:09:34 Jon Halliday , Jung Chang - Mao
1:10:40 Frank McLynn - Marcus Aurelius Warrior Philosopher Emperor
1:11:45 Susan Quinn - Marie Curie
1:13:10 Antonia Fraser - Mary Queen of Scots
1:13:45 Hershel Parker - Herman Melville
1:14:35 Langdon Hammer - James Merrill Life and Art
1:15:15 Edmund Morris - Colonel Roosevelt
1:16:15 Louise Hall Tharp - Mrs. Jack A Biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner
1:17:35 Mary Renault - The Nature of Alexander
1:19:00 Gale E Christianson - In The Presence of the Creator Isaac Newton His Times
1:20:00 Richard Zenith - Pessoa
1:21:00 John Richardson - A Life of Picasso
1:21:40 Kenneth Silverman - Edgar A Poe A Biography
1:22:45 Peter Hebblethwaite - Pope John XXIII Shepherd of the Modern World
1:24:10 Caroline Fraser - Prairie Fires The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder
1:25:30 John E Mack - A Prince of Our Disorder The Life of T E Lawrence
1:26:15 Paula Byrne - The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym
1:27:10 Jack Beatty - The Rascal King The Life and Times of James Michael Curley
1:29:50 Heather Clark - Red Comet The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
1:30:40 Esther Forbes - Paul Revere and The World He Lived In
1:32:10 Bartholomew Sparrow - The Strategist Brent Scowcroft and The Call of National Security
1:33:40 Frances Kiernan - Seeing Mary Plain A Life of Mary McCarthy
1:34:46 Ryszard Kapuscinski -  Shah Of Shahs
1:35:20 Richard Holmes - Shelley The Pursuit
1:36:15 Mary S Lovell - The Sisters The Saga of the Mitford Family
1:37:25 Evan S Connell - Son Of the Morning Star Custer and the Little Bighorn
1:38:35 Allan W Eckert - A Sorrow In Our Heart The Life of Tecumseh
1:40:50 Stephen Kotkin - Stalin
1:41:43 Victoria Wilson - A Life of Barbara Stanwyck
1:42:38  Jackson J. Benson - John Steinbeck Writer A Biography
1:43:42 Angus Wilson - The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling
1:44:10 Leo Damrosch - Jonathan Swift His Life & His World
1:45:10 Charles Moore - Margaret Thatcher
1:45:55 Juan Williams - Thurgood Marshall American Revolutionary
1:46:50 Ron Powers - Mark Twain
1:48:05 Gregory White Smith , Steven Naifeh - Van Gogh The Life
1:50:00 James Thomas Flexner - Washington The Indispensable Man
1:50:40 Simon Callow - Orson Welles Hello Americans
1:52:40 Elizabeth Longford - Wellington
1:53:09 Hermione Lee - Edith Wharton
1:54:03 Justin Kaplan - Whitman
1:55:10 Bruce Allen Murphy - Wild Bill The Legend and Life of William O Douglas
1:57:20 John C G Rohl - Kaiser Wilhelm II
1:59:15 Philip Ziegler - King William IV
1:59:40 Viviane Forrester - Virginia Woolf A Portrait
2:00:48 Nancy Milford - Zelda

Perfectly timed book buying temptation video for a double whammy of losing my job and my imminent birthday. Thanks Steve. 🤣

Thanks Steve, my favourite books to read are biography or history so I've written a list from some of these book recs.

Amazing, we need more videos like this Steve.

Ohhhhhhh my. What a treat.

You are insane, I love it 😂😂😂

Thank you so much for this video I could only imagine how many biographies have been published Just in my lifetime let alone every biography ever published so this makes it a little less stressful picking a good one

Thank you for this Steve.  So many biographies I want to read. I would love for you to do the Part Two!

A wonderful set of recommendations, thank-you so much for the time and effort you put into this!

What a great video, waiting for part 2! I don’t read many biographies but I do have that biography of the Brontes and E.M. Forster on my shelves (the latter thanks to you), waiting to be read :) I’m so happy you praise Hermione Lee’s biography of Edith Wharton as I just bought it last year on vacation in a charity shop in Edinburgh, I love Wharton's work. I’ve been thinking of Zenith’s Pessoa book but the size has been scaring me... The Book of Disquiet is one of my favourite books. Writing down that Woolf biography!

Bring on Part 2 this was wonderful!! Thanks Steve

Hands up for a Part 2, or multi-part, divided into sub-genres (“Lives of the Poets” anyone?).

I missed hearing the author of the Bach biography conduct last year after he got fired for punching one of his singers — his is the only one of the 100 that I own and which I had considered myself likely to read.

What a video! I can die now, for I am happy.

I love reading biographies, and this must be the best biography recommendation video, I have ever seen. Thanks for all the recommendations. This video made me want to read a lot of these books - and it made me want to make my own top 100 list of biographies.

Oh my God, he did it again!

You've just made my evening!!