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What has happened to biographies?
BIOGRAPHIES have boomed in recent years, bestowing wealth and acclaim on practitioners like Michael Holroyd and Richard Holmes, but according to Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian the business is in a critical state, and she knows whom to blame. Ten years ago Amanda Foreman published her biography of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Foreman was bright, ambitious and good-looking, and happy to pose naked behind a stack of her books, and nothing has been the same ever since.
According to Hughes (the biographer of Mrs Beeton) royal mistresses have proliferated at the expense of more worthwhile subjects: “Georgiana was the precursor of modern-day celebrity culture, in which Being Jordan which is surely a ghosted autobiography, rather than a biography sells 335,649 in hardback, while Hilary Spurling's life of Matisse splutters along on 12,451.
It seems a bit hard to blame it on the hapless Foreman: royal mistresses have always sold best in the biography stakes, and Nancy Mitford wasn¹t rapped across the knuckles half a century ago when she produced her biography of Madame de Pompadour. But Amanda F. is not the only villain of the piece: equally culpable, it seems, are publishers, who far prefer to commission a well-known name to write another unnecessary biography of Hitler or Napoleon rather than risk an untried author and an unfamiliar subject. There's some truth in the accusation, but again it¹s nothing new.
In the 1930s Jonathan Cape, the most distinguished literary publisher of the day, urged authors stuck for a subject to have another crack at Nelson; O G S Crawford is hardly a household name, yet Kitty Hauser found herself a publisher and was widely reviewed. Kathryn Hughes approves the Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate¹s suggestion of a 'paradigm shift', in that bright biographers now concentrate on an aspect of a life rather than a blow-by-blow account.
The truth is that too many biographies are boring and badly written: their authors may or may not be familiar with primary sources, but unlike Hesketh Pearson (who wasn¹t) they cannot tell a story, crack a joke, build up the subsidiary characters, or modulate between slow and fast, sad and funny. If some of them fail to find publishers, so much the better.
Cold Blood
COLD BLOOD is James Fleming’s fourth novel, and the sequel to White Blood. ‘This is such a shamelessly old-fashioned yarn that it makes you smile just reading it,’ began a delighted Max Davidson in the Mail on Sunday. ‘When was a fictional hero last strafed by a villain flying a Fokker? But don’t be deceived: James Fleming, nephew of Ian, is a class act: a brilliant, pacey storyteller with a muscular prose style.’ Set during the Russian Revolution, the book features the inimitable Charlie Doig, ‘a testosterone-fuelled hero in the Bond tradition’, seeking vengeance for the death of his aristocratic wife at the hands of Glebov, a cold-hearted Bolshevik.
‘This is a thriller, no bones about it,’ said Giles Whittell in the Times. ‘Into the pursuit of the flabby, dwarfish, sub-Blofeld Prokhor Glebov by the towering, irresistible, beyond-Bond Charlie Doig are dragged a seductress who makes her first move in a crowded tram, a Mongolian psychopath on a horse called Tornado, a preposterous American cryptographer and, of course, an armoured train.’ Whittell could not help being ‘grabbed and swept along’ by the excitement: ‘For anyone who feels that there aren’t enough armoured trains in today’s popular fiction, or enough murderous White Russians with God and destiny on their side – and I am one – this book is a must.’
‘The story rattles along like an absconding locomotive,’ agreed Andrew Taylor in the Spectator. ‘Doig may operate in a John Buchan world, but he gives the impression of being permanently high on steroids, amphetamines and the occasional dose of viagra. He is almost as terrifying as the revolution itself.
‘This is a thriller, no bones about it,’ said Giles Whittell in the Times. ‘Into the pursuit of the flabby, dwarfish, sub-Blofeld Prokhor Glebov by the towering, irresistible, beyond-Bond Charlie Doig are dragged a seductress who makes her first move in a crowded tram, a Mongolian psychopath on a horse called Tornado, a preposterous American cryptographer and, of course, an armoured train.’ Whittell could not help being ‘grabbed and swept along’ by the excitement: ‘For anyone who feels that there aren’t enough armoured trains in today’s popular fiction, or enough murderous White Russians with God and destiny on their side – and I am one – this book is a must.’
‘The story rattles along like an absconding locomotive,’ agreed Andrew Taylor in the Spectator. ‘Doig may operate in a John Buchan world, but he gives the impression of being permanently high on steroids, amphetamines and the occasional dose of viagra. He is almost as terrifying as the revolution itself.
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