Half a century after TS Eliot’s death, a year of literary biographies kicked off well with Young Eliot: From St Louis to The Waste Land by Robert Crawford (Jonathan Cape). This enthralling portrait of the midwesterner who reinvented himself in England exposes the harrowing backstory to the making of The Waste Land. A shy, brilliant and deeply wounded young man, tormented by a prolonged struggle to reconcile his public and private face, “Tom Eliot” became “Old Possum”, the elderly Anglophile who would later dismiss The Waste Land as “a piece of rhythmical grumbling”. It was as if, says Crawford at the conclusion of this biographical milestone, “he had never been young”.

Ted Hughes, who died too soon in 1998, was always young, trapped in the afterlife of his youthful, impetuous and doomed marriage to Sylvia Plath. I did not expect to like Jonathan Bate’s unauthorised biography, which was initially sponsored by the Hughes estate, whereupon it became the subject of a bruising contractual bust-up. But, setting that issue aside, Ted Hughes (Harper Collins) narrates an extraordinary life with sympathy, tact, and very wide research. Hughes’s life is littered with unexploded literary ordnance that his biographer steps past more or less unscathed. His best pages are literary critical more than biographical. Bate, who modestly admits his cannot be the last word, has crafted a persuasive, credible and nuanced portrait of one of Britain’s greatest poets.

Beth Mackintosh, born 1896, was a young Scottish woman who might have understood, and even investigated, the emotion in Hughes’s life. Having lost her sweetheart in the early days of the first world war, she turned to literature. First as Josephine Tey, and then as the playwright Gordon Daviot, she established one of the strangest and most unexplored literary careers of the 20th century. Josephine Tey by Jennifer Morag Henderson (Sandstone Press) is doubly important. It strips away a lot of the myth surrounding Mackintosh; and it also tells the moving story of a major leading Scots writer for whom the detective novel became “a medium as disciplined as any sonnet”.

In the department of criminology, Adam Sisman deserves the biographer’s equivalent of the military cross for having brought his authorised life of David Cornwell before the public. John le Carré (Bloomsbury) will not be the final word on this fascinating subject but, as an interim report, it could hardly be bettered. In 2016, we will read what Le Carré himself has to reveal in the autobiographical volume scheduled for next autumn.

Elsewhere, “life writing” hardly comes more personal than Words Without Music by Philip Glass (Faber), a fascinating account of the composer’s work with Nadia Boulanger, Samuel Beckett, Martin Scorsese and Ravi Shankar among many, plus the inside story of Einstein On the Beach.

The novelist Adam Mars-Jones, and the painter Matthew Spender, both had well-known, and dominant, fathers with strong views on homosexuality. One was for it; the other against. In Kid Gloves (Penguin), Mars-Jones gives a moving, lucid and frequently hilarious portrait of life with a demented homophobe. Spender’s A House in St John’s Wood (HarperCollins), though less entertaining, is a painfully frank and impressive negotiation with his father’s ghost.

And so to two Tory PMs, both outsiders. Benjamin Disraeli remains extraordinarily modern. His seductive “one nation” rhetoric was appropriated by Ed Miliband. His Regency metrosexual aesthetic anticipated Oscar Wilde by some 70 years. And then there’s his marriage. Daisy Hay’s Mr & Mrs Disraeli (Chatto & Windus) reminds us, yet again, how much more complex and intriguing the Victorians were than we sometimes think.

Everything She Wants (Allen Lane), the second volume of Charles Moore’s authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher, is (if possible) even more impressive than its predecessor. The lady herself is no longer with us, and Moore’s spellbinding narrative seems liberated by this freedom. If volume three equals its predecessors, we shall be hailing this as one of the great political biographies of our time.

Thatcher aside, the year’s most entertaining biography is Orson Welles: One-Man Band (Cape), the third and probably final volume in Simon Callow’s study. This wonderfully vivid account of Welles’s tireless exploits in theatre, radio, film, television and even ballet is compulsive reading. Only an actor, director and writer as gifted and ebullient as Callow could have found the nerve to do this. Callow becomes Welles and, strangely, Welles almost becomes Callow. The only mystery is why, in Welles’s centenary year, his publishers waited until the end of 2015 to release such a tour de force.

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