Portable and to the point

An old biographer friend of mine, having churned out several lives of the great over the years, eventually told me over a boozy and depressing lunch that he had had enough, and that he wouldn’t be writing another one ‘for as long as I live’. As it happens he didn’t live that long, but you can still see his point. The literary biography has become such a massive, thumping, thudding beast, vaster than books have a right to be, that the prospect of opening another one weighs heavily on the heart, and several other parts of the body as well.

How has this ridiculous situation come to pass? One hesitates to point a finger at anyone, but let’s do so anyway. Peter Ackroyd is the man to blame. His biography of Dickens, longer than any of the great man’s books, was so enormous he later republished it in an abridged version so people might actually read it. By then it was too late: he had already upped the ante. These days too many biographers occupy their own darkened corner of the literary playground, playing a game of ancient provenance. Mine’s bigger than yours. No, it isn’t, mine’s bigger. And so on.

Ackroyd’s ‘Brief Lives’ series could therefore be seen as a form of penance, an apology for past sins. This is the third in the series: short, pithy biographies of Great Britons, none more than 200 pages in length. I haven’t read Chaucer and Turner, but after Newton I intend to. It’s a terrific piece of work, and you can carry it around without the slightest risk of physical injury.

Sir Isaac Newton, of course, is eminent enough to have merited the full biography treatment many times over.