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. That is until you start to read Ackroyd:
"William Shakespeare is popularly supposed to have been born on 23 April 1564, or St George's Day. The date may in fact have been 21 April or 22 April, but the coincidences of the national festival is at least appropriate.
" When he emerged from the womb into the world of time, with the assistance of a midwife, an infant of the sixteenth century was washed and then 'swaddled' by being wrapped tightly in soft cloth. Then he was carried downstairs in order to be presented to the father. After this ritual greeting, he was taken back to the birth-chamber, still warm and dark, where he was laid beside the mother. She was meant to draw to her all the diseases from the child, before her infant was put in a cradle. A small portion of butter and honey was usually placed in the baby's mouth. It was the custom in Warwickshire to give the suckling child hare's brains reduced to jelly.
" The date of Shakespeare's christening, unlike that of his birth, is exactly known: he was baptised in the Church of the Holy Trinity, in Stratford, on Wednesday 26 April 1564. In the register of that church, the parish clerk has written Guilelmus filius Johannes Shakespeare; he slipped in his latin, and should have written Johannis."
What Ackroyd does in these first paragraphs is not only give us the facts, slender as they are, but also a feel for that most important of literary births, a birth that was no different to any other in its rituals, rituals that were still being carried on in Warwickshire when I was born, although I don't think I was fed hare's brains, but most certainly butter and honey. And it's those little details that make Ackroyd the great biographer who is also the great historian, because he builds up a picture of place and time, making us realize as he does so, that in many respects things, once all the accumulated nonsense is drained away - are not so different to our own experiences; in other words he makes it real and meaningful, of yesterday and not four hundred years ago.
I read 'Shakespeare: The Biography', slowly so as to savour every word and sentence, every speck of detail, every smell and sound of a writer's life, a writer who changed not only how we hear and write, but how we see our world, which is still through his intellectual filter, and that of Ackroyd, who, as all good historians ( biographers) should, reminds us of the past, which is our past, our biography.