Those who can, make history; those who can’t, write history; those who can’t write history write biography.
This, at least, was once the attitude of professional historians toward biography. Biography was either too narrow (oblivious to the great sweep of political, social, economic and intellectual changes), too shallow (one cannot begin to plumb the complexities of an era through the life of one person), too presumptuous (surely no one believes that one person, no matter how powerful, can actually inflect the course of history) or too trivial (more or less the above three criticisms combined).
Read Full Article »