biographer

Martyrdom made a saint of the trivial and foolish Marie Antoinette, and her biographers still keep her fragrant with the odor of sanctity to this day, while unconsciously proving upon almost every page they write that the only calamitous instinct which her husband lacked, she supplied--the instinct to root out and get rid of an honest, able, and loyal official, wherever she found him.

"I have been listening attentively to your narrative of my adventures," replied the chair; "and it must be owned that your correctness entitles you to be held up as a pattern to biographers. Nevertheless, there are a few omissions which I should be glad to see supplied.

Of middle height, rather lean than otherwise, he had deep-set eyes, a mean appearance, his hair was coarse, black and thin, which, say the biographers of his time, made him take early to the skull-cap.

His life's changes are almost entirely inward ones; it falls into broad, untroubled, perhaps somewhat monotonous, spaces; his biographers have very little to tell.

A "hero" Battle of Britain veteran has died hours after celebrating his 100th birthday, taking the number of surviving members of The Few to five, his biographer has said.

Rory Stewart tells the #LobbyHustings he did not work for MI6 @HannahAlOthman Future biographer: That was not true was it?

Royal biographer Andrew Morton has been rushed to hospital after collapsing with a suspected stroke, it has been reported.

What inspires, or dare say, compels someone to become a literary biographer? Ever perched like some highbrow voyeur on the sidelines, required to spend countless hours rooting through dusty letters and journals in far-flung archives, perhaps tracking down and interviewing the disgruntled friends, colleagues or ex-wives of authors--these are hardly the components of the glamorous life.

In the Channel 5 documentary Diana: 7 Days That Shook The Windsors last night, the princess's biographer Tina Brown said: "The children couldn't understand why everything was as normal, except a couple of hours earlier they'd been told their mother had died."

I was rendered speechless, not only in chagrin over the stories she had evidently resolved not to tell me, but also because her misunderstanding of what biography is all about left me unable to let her know that it was precisely "gossip" that the biographer seeks.

When a literary biographer travels to Venice in search of the love letters of the deceased American poet Jeffrey Aspern, he learns that the letters' owner is an unpleasant elderly woman, living alone save for her emotionally neglected niece.

As a biographer you are the storyteller of someone else's life, and you find a narrative thread that makes sense.

Donaldson's study of the practice of literary biography is simultaneously erudite and confessional, objective and personal--and he thus models for the reader the inherent contradictions of this "impossible craft." The biographer's task is archaeological: she must sift through the detritus of another's life--not only rejected book titles, manuscript drafts, letters sent and received, but also letters written but not sent, books and magazines read, maps, medical records, fishing logs, an order for take-out barbeque, and other, stranger, ephemera--and from these articles formulate a personality with all its complications and inconsistencies.