For truly excellent historical biography, try something by Antonia Fraser (recently deceased, alas). Her award-winning body of work includes The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England, Mary Queen of Scots, and Marie Antoinette. Fraser is known for digging deep into the motivations of her biographical subjects, and is great at digging up unknown information.

Historical biographies have a steamy side. How about a British duchess whose husband has an affair with a woman? Not steamy enough? What if the duchess then has an affair with the woman, and she moves in to make them a threesome? Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire, by Amanda Foreman, tells this compelling story about a duchess said to be the most beautiful and sweet woman in England, and who is ultimately destroyed by her own passions.

But then there are just steamy-steamy biographies. You know them – the unauthorized biographies, the ones where the author goes around to everyone who hates the subject to get all the dirt? Kitty Kelley is the most well-known (and sometimes reviled) of these, and has written biographies on people from the Bush family to the British Royal Family, from Elizabeth Taylor to Nancy Reagan. These are the biographies you’ll usually find displayed in the front section of the bookstore and they are oh so much more fun to read than the ones the star wrote himself – and probably no more or less true.

Memoir is a form of autobiography that has seen a recent upsurge: Angela’s Ashes, by Frank McCourt, or Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi, are two recent memoirs, showing you not only the inside of another person’s head but the workings of sometimes surprisingly alien cultures.

People love other people. There is no more direct way to know another person than by reading the details, good and bad, of their lives.