Not many collections of old reviews and lectures make worthwhile books, no matter how skilfully topped and tailed; but everything Hermione Lee, who both writes and teaches biography, has written about the state of the biographer’s art in recent years is worth re-reading. The title is off-putting, suggestive of the morgue, and there is something irritating about the subtitle as well: ‘life-writing’, apart from being clumsy, suggests that ‘biography’ is somehow old-fashioned, perhaps unlikely to lure students to a seminar. However, Professor Lee justifies the term by pointing out the incontrovertible fact that there are many different ways for writers to tell life stories — memoir, autobiography, journalism, diaries, letters, even fiction — and clinches it by reminding us that the subject of her last biography, Virginia Woolf, may have invented, and certainly used, the nasty phrase.

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