by Steve Newman

Created on: October 01, 2009

Biography can often be one of the best forms of written history, that by seeing, and experiencing, the past through the life of one man or woman brings the times in which they lived much more vividly to life. It's how I write history. I also think that a handful of biographers are some of the very best, and most inspirational, writers and historians around.

Third from the top of my list is Michael Holroyd, whose biographies of Augustus John, and Lytton Strachey, are second to none in their ability to give a clear and penetrating picture not only of their iconoclastic subjects, but also of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By comparison, a straight forward narrative of the period will not easily hold the reader. Second is the American author, Robert K. Massie, whose hugely readable volumes on Nicholas and Alexandra, and Peter the Great, are works of near genius, with his Dreadnought - which is the biography of a ship and not a person - a complete work of historical genius because it brings alive a period, the early 1900s, that was dominated by the first arms-race, personified in that most beautiful, innovative, and very deadly of battle ships, HMS Dreadnought (designed by an Italian), which created a whole new class of battleships, battle-cruisers, and destroyers, that would dominate the high seas right into the 1960s.But what Massie also does in this biography of a ship is write many satellite biographies of some of the main human players - famous, infamous, and until Massie came along, the unknown. It is a masterful piece of work.

But at the top of my list is one of the finest biographers working today: Peter Ackroyd.

Ackroyd has a formidable list of biographical work to his created, most notably his volumes on T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Blake, London ( the biography of a city), and perhaps most famously, Charles Dickens, which is a work of mind-blowing detail that never becomes dull or boring. And the reason Ackroyd's work is never dull or boring (and none of them are) is because Ackroyd is, first and foremost, a story-teller, and a damned good one. He wants to impart not only his knowledge ( which is formidable), but also his passion for his subject. He succeeds.

One of Ackroyd's most recent works is, Shakespeare: The Biography, which is a difficult subject to deal with because, unlike his other subjects, so very little is really known about Shakespeare, yet so much has been written about him as to make yet another biography of the man seem rather pointless.

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