Those biographies of his friends reveal his sympathy with Anne-Robert-Jacques Anne-Robert-Jacques Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgote suffering of the French populace before the French Revolution and with Voltaire's opposition to theconomic.
In the novel's last section, set in 2008, the young man from the provinces, who optimistically read Angus Wilson, has become Paul Bryant, "who writes all those biographies — there was that one that caused all the fuss about the Bishop of Durham".
Michael Scammell's Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual is one of those vast biographies that slightly puzzles me.
Still, it does so without the sort of condescending and at times voyeuristic speculation that hobbled those earlier biographies, and it does an evocative job of tracing the evolution of Salinger's work and thinking.
But none of those jumbo biographies would seem to compare in Brobdingnagian excess to Victoria Wilson's "A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True, 1907-1940," which takes readers on a 1,056-page 1,056-page
"Legacy" publishing does best in the first category: it commands the advances needed for research, the editing talent to shape the writing and the marketing muscle to distribute those doorstop biographies on Father's Day.
You might not know it from reading those blockbusting biographies of the founding fathers, but sex was everywhere, "regulated, controlled, discussed and crafted as part of an effort to create social stability and define racial, class and gender social boundaries".
My father, John Steinbeck, was a man who held human history in great reverence, and in particular the biographies of those people who had risked their lives, their fortunes, and their worldly honor to defend the rights and prerogatives of those who were powerless to defend themselves.
We therefore consider two groups of biographies: those with birth date prior to 1900, and those with birth date from 1900 onwards.
In other words, Gaudí is one of those whose biography tells you almost nothing about his work.
He peers at the book from multiple angles — those of biography, geography, publishing, textual variation, and mild erotic sleuthing, among others — as if hoping to catch it at an unfamiliar slant.
