Very good choices. I love the Higgins book. I still haven't read the Evans biography, (got it for my birthday) but I have read wonderful reviews upon it.

Over at another board, I posted a bit about Evans, particularly the controversy that did swirl around his head. Leonard Palmer, the great linguist, was puzzled by some of his findings that married the linguistic elements of Linear B with archeological timelines favored by Evans, and Palmer, after investigating, stopped just short of accusing Evans of fudging data.

Sometimes there's as much drama going on with the archaeologists, morphologists, linguists, dendrochronologists, and historians as there is on any nighttime drama. Or, daytime.