It is more than 30 years since Mark Amory declared biography dead, when he published his edition of Evelyn Waugh’s letters. Despite the best efforts of Victoria Glendinning (notably on Trollope) and Claire Tomalin (on Pepys and many others) there has been no grand critical resurrection since, until this year and the announcement of the shortlist for the Costa Awards. Sarah Bakewell’s life of Montaigne has received the recognition of which Spectator reviewers Philip Hensher and David Sexton believed it worthy.
However, every silver lining has its cloud: the judges chose only 3 biographies when they could have chosen 4, a decision that is being seen as a statement to support the fashionable view that
publishers are growing uninterested in ‘serious biography’ as a genre. The Guardian reports:
‘Trollope biographer Victoria Glendinning told the Observer on Sunday that she was having to self-finance her research on her next subject, Sir Stamford Raffles.
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