Biographer who altered perceptions of Henry Morton Stanley, David Livingstone, Robert Baden-Powell and other figures active in Africa

Thanks to the biographer and novelist Tim Jeal, who has died aged 81, we now know that one of the most famous sentences in journalism – “Dr Livingstone, I presume?” – was almost certainly never uttered.

In November 1871, after a 700-mile expedition, the Welsh-American journalist and adventurer Henry Morton Stanley tracked down David Livingstone, the Scottish missionary and explorer. He had been lost to the outside world for six years and was now nearing death, in Ujiji, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in present-day Tanzania.

The star takes us back to 70s New York to recount his breakthrough, and it’s a great yarn – but it’s laced with anger

The Philadelphia Museum of Art contains a 14th-century Buddhist temple, a one-acre sculpture garden and works by Picasso, Renoir and Van Gogh. Its most famous attraction, however, is a flight of stone steps that draws several million tourists every year. These are the so-called “Rocky Steps”, immortalised by Sylvester Stallone in his 1976 movie about an underdog boxer who needs to build up his strength. The climb is a lung-busting challenge, but if unremarkable Rocky can sprint all the way to the top, he gives hope and encouragement to everyone down below.

It’s not just the fans who relate to Rocky Balboa. So too does Stallone, whose entertaining rags-to-riches memoir paints the creator and his creation as all but indivisible, each an extension of the other. Stallone was flat broke and beaten down when he wrote his film about “the forgotten man”, the blue-collar schlub with a good heart and firm chin. Everyone knows that Rocky is being set up as a fall guy. He can’t possibly defeat Apollo Creed, the dazzling, charismatic, undefeated heavyweight champion of the world. Except that Rocky doesn’t care, he only wants to be seen, and in scripting an unlikely redemptive arc for his hero, Stallone wound up transforming his own fortunes as well.

From Coronation Street to It’s a Sin, Davies’ memoir of a career in TV is also a rallying cry for creativity

Television is an intimate art form, once beamed into living rooms, now on devices right in front of our faces. The screenwriter Russell T Davies understands that intimacy. Whether discussing his early days developing lost-to-history soap spin-offs, making a splash with the pioneering gay series Queer As Folk, or reviving Doctor Who to great acclaim, he makes it feel as if you’re at the pub with him, settling in for the night, ready to hear his best stories.

This warm and gossipy autobiography offers a peek behind the curtains of the British TV industry, and as such, it goes light on Davies’s own life story. Instead, he gallops through five decades in the business, using the framework of his TV shows to propel the book forward at great speed. He was born in Swansea in 1963, to a family who loved watching TV. While he was studying English at Oxford, a friend suggested that, as he thought television was so great, he should consider doing it as his job.

The Handmaid’s Tale author reflects on her loves, losses and literary achievements in a memoir that showcases her wisdom and wit

Margaret Atwood had to be persuaded to write a memoir. The thought of writing about herself initially seemed “dead boring. Who wants to read about someone sitting at a desk messing up blank sheets of paper?” Yet, she continues, time passed and the possibility of a memoir took on a “lurid phosphorescent glow. ‘Wasn’t there something appealing in the idea?’ my sinister alter ego whispered … I could thank my benefactors, reward my friends, trash my enemies and pay off scores long forgotten by everyone but me.”

Subtitled “A Memoir of Sorts”, Book of Lives is the Canadian author’s account of her loves, losses and literary achievements (she has written just over 50 books, including novels, short stories and poetry collections), and a fine showcase for her wisdom and wit. What little score-settling she includes is purely for the punchline. When a poet told Atwood in the early 1970s that she wrote like a man – he intended it as a compliment – she told him he forgot the punctuation. “What you meant was, ‘She writes. Like a man’.”

The Talking Heads frontman considers dormant ideas that made a comeback – from Indian irrigation to Kafka

There’s barely been a moment in  the last half-century when David Byrne hasn’t been zinging about, dancing forward, opting odd. The art-school dropout frontman of Talking Heads, he moved sideways into ballet, dance and experimental theatre, collaborated on the proto-ambient LP My Life in the Bush of Ghosts with his fellow polymath Brian Eno, directed films, wrote musicals (on – of course – Imelda Marcos), co-founded a label (Luaka Bop) that introduced the likes of Os Mutantes and William Onyeabor to a new generation, brought out books of tree drawings, and designed bicycle racks.

Byrne’s career – by most measures a remarkably successful one – has been built from code-switching, fidgety intelligence, stylistic infidelity. At first glance then, it’s surprising that Sleeping Beauties is devoted to failure – to artists who were ignored, laughed at, forgotten; to ideas deemed batty or heretical; to ways of thinking about the world – sustaining it, replenishing it – that, often for political reasons, were found wanting, and wiped from our collective memory banks. Sleeping beauties is (of course) a term he first encountered in an academic paper by Leiden University scientometrics professor Ton van Raan. That was in 2004: this book, like a lot of the ideas and energies it animates, needed time to ferment.