I am perfectly ready to concede that I was wrong, and the author of this substantial first biography of O'Brian would almost certainly think so.
Upon the publication of this book, Frances Kiernan's "Seeing Mary Plain," the third substantial biography of Mary McCarthy in 12 years, the question must be asked: is McCarthy -- a viperously clever but minor writer, much admired, much detested -- now less read than read about?
Before the movie, there had been precisely one substantial biography.
He needs a substantial biography to bring him into focus.
Mr. Roe's substantial biography makes only modest claims about Keats and opium, presenting some possible evidence of laudanum use.
Though a man of the Enlightenment, Kant also believed, however, that humanity had a natural propensity to "radical evil .Manfred Kuehn's excellent new life is the first substantial biography of Kant since Germany's historical catastrophe, and the figure who emerges is not the familiar caricature of a withdrawn Prussian professor.
Andrew Hodges, who published the first substantial biography of Turing, Alan Turing: The Enigma, in 1983, suggests that "the production and presentation of the new film [reflects] underlying cultural and political changes" of the last decade and a half – leading to Gordon Brown's posthumous apology to Turing in 2009, and subsequent royal pardon in 2013.
During this time, several other substantial biographies appeared but none, Monk suggests, has successfully integrated his life and work … This fine, painstaking book makes most recent biography seem slight, even irrelevant".
He also gives us fairly substantial biographies of almost every leading actor in every film, as well as details about supporting players, writers, cinematographers, art directors and so on.
Henry's reign did not receive much attention from historians for many years after the 1950s: no substantial biographies of Henry were written after Powicke's, and the historian John Beeler observed in the 1970s that the coverage of Henry's reign by military historians remained particularly thin.
