biographers-from-england

"Barlow's intellectual and scholarly qualities are arguably most evident in his editions of complex and technically difficult Latin texts, whose meaning he would elucidate with an almost unrivalled brilliance, and in the writing of biography, a genre about which he thought very deeply, as befitted someone who had contemplated a career as a novelist in his youth. Edward the Confessor (1970), William Rufus (1983) and Thomas Becket (1986) are all very important, and demonstrate a profoundly insightful and carefully reasoned determination to penetrate the religious attitudes of the historians of the 11th and 12th centuries in order to reveal the secular world beneath."

"William Rufus had a remarkable career, even for the late eleventh century, when opportunities for the adventurous and talented were plentiful. Born into the middle ranks of the French aristocracy, and only a younger son, he rose first through the achievements of his father, William 'the Conqueror', duke of Normandy, and then through the misfortunes of his elder brothers. Still a landless when his father died in 1087, he took whatever chances came his way, and by the time of his own premature death thirteen years later had become a king of great renown. He was acclaimed by soldiers for his chivalry and magnanimity; and the flaws of his character proved to be no hindrance to success."

"On the 1170, the morrow of the , that is to say, Tuesday, 29 December, Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury, of the whole of England and of the , was murdered in his cathedral church by four noble knights from the household of his lord and former patron and friend, King Henry II. He had just celebrated what was thought to be his fiftieth birthday. The horror which the killing inspired and the miraculous cures performed at his tomb transfigured the victim into one of the most popular saints in the late-medieval calendar and made one of the greatest pilgrim shrines in the West. The modern , although doubtless better organized, gives some idea of medieval Canterbury with its phials of water tinctured, if faintly, with the blood of the martyr, and its highly charged atmosphere, a combination of the pathetic hopes of the sick and the jollity of the holiday-makers. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales kept the saint's memory green after the Reformation, and the drama has attracted distinguished modern playwrights."

"... today even our s are presented at a Garden Court, followed by a more or less picnic on the lawn. All classes and ranks share in this taste ..."

"Considerable difficulties, however, beset the way of 's biographer. Her life was so much bound up with her husband's career that to write an orthodox biography would merely be to repeat the story which has already been told with such fullness and brilliance by and ."

"He cannot be seen as an Enlightenment figure. What we think of as eighteenth-century, in terms of architecture, furniture, painting and the decorative arts, came mostly after his heyday. He died in 1745 and was isolated by deafness and dementia from the late 1730s."

"This fascination with the whale, like ’s report from Southampton Water, was an expression of Victorian fashion, a characteristic marriage of ingenious science and human curiosity. In England, live whales were delivered to aquaria in and (although one show was closed, for fear the flagrant activities of its performers should offend genteel dispositions), and in September 1877 a arrived in , in the centre of the world's greatest city."

"Hoare's Leviathan is part natural history, part literary criticism, part economics and part memoir but at its heart is the author's lifelong obsession for all things whale. ... He traces his love of whales to reading Moby-Dick and vividly recalls his first actual encounter with a at . Hoare now frequently travels to as a volunteer on a identification programme."

"… He moves from personal to literary history with muscular seamlessness (much as he did in the earlier books). We leap from Melville to Robert Louis Stevenson to the inevitable Byron; from Elizabeth Barrett Browning – “ in ” – to Sylvia Plath to Virginia Woolf. There are passages about Oscar Wilde and , both of whom Hoare addressed in earlier, rather lighter-hearted biographies. There’s some lovely stuff on Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen – “he looks like a boy you knew at school”. … … RisingTideFallingStar is about the author’s relationship to the sea, but then that could be said about both Leviathan and The Sea Inside. What changes with each subsequent book is that the authorial gaze becomes increasingly inward and self-revealing, the tone more forlorn, until some passages in RisingTideFallingStar attain an almost posthumous air, as if the book might also serve as a suicide note."

"Behind me, bare s and es lie as cracks against the sky, evoking a peculiarly English landscape. In the late eighteenth century, drew the abbey's ruins in his sketchbook, tracing out the trees that had grown up around the crumbling gothic arches. In 1816 stayed at on his honeymoon, and painted its scudding clouds and billowing scenery. Theirs were records of a Romantic setting, an alternative reality of sensation and emotion. Hanging over the shore, the gnarled, enamelled branches are made darker by the reflected light of the sea and the stretch of bright shingle,"

"So much has been said by Forster himself in the Life about the dramatic performances in aid of the comparatively short-lived , that to do more than touch upon it here would be superfluous. Of course its real founder was Dickens himself, seconded, though I fancy with not quite so much enthusiasm, by , Forster, Mr. (afterwards Sir) , , , , and many others in the world of Literature and Art."

"It was Forster who suggested that should die. Dickens took this and ran with it — he thought it was brilliant."

"... It is the fact that teaches, and not any sermonizing drawn from it. Oliver Twist is the history of a child born in a and brought up by overseers, and there is nothing introduced that is out of keeping with the design."

"... If to owe nothing to other men is to be original, a more original man than Swift never lived; but, with the wonderful subtlety of thought so rarely joined to the same robustness of intellect which placed his wit and philosophy on the level of Rabelais, he had the same habit as the great Frenchman of turning things inside out, and putting away decencies as if they were shows or hypocrisies. In both it led to an insufferable coarseness."

"By 1831, when Forster was 18 and Lamb 55, they had met and become friends. Lamb was then living in retirement at as a distinguished literary man. Like Leigh Hunt he would have attracted Forster because of his links with the recent and glamorous past, for Lamb had known the young Wordsworth, had known Southey and Hazlitt; Coleridge had been his 'fifty years old friend without a dissension'. ... He was a fine critic and a great essayist. His sister was a lunatic and he himself a saddened, garrulous, humorous, and gregarious bachelor who often drank too much. Drinking and gregarious gossiping suited the young Forster, and Forster suited Lamb, who treated him with a mixture of patronage, affection and reliance."

", whose life and adventures should be known to all who know his writings, must be held to have succeeded in nothing that his friends would have had him succeed in. He was intended for a clergyman, and was rejected when he applied for orders; he practiced as a physician, and never made what would have paid for a degree; what he was not asked or expected to do, was to write, but he wrote and paid the penalty. His existence was a continued privation. The days were few, in which he had resources for the night, or dared to look forward to the morrow."

"... No one conversant with can have failed to be struck by the extraordinary lawlessness that prevailed at sea. The coasts for the most part were without watch or defence. The dissolute extravagance of the court took no heed of the subject's claim to protection; and if a needy lord could fill his spendthrift purse for a day by help of a maritime freebooter, the honest merchant was helpless against the plunderer and pirate. As a consequence, the coasts swarmed with such; but of all who had so obtained infamous distinction, the most notorious was Captain . This man had possessed himself of several pirate ships,and no point along the Irish or western sea was safe from his attacks."

"Tomalin herself examines the with the confident judgments of a , not the hedged and sometimes overawed appraisals of a scholar. Appreciative of Hardy’s genius, she still finds his body of fiction “exceptionally uneven.” “,” the novel that made him rich, remains by Tomalin’s measure an awkward production in spots, and yet it “glows with the intensity” of Hardy’s imagination."

"s for girls were not hard to find in the 1780s, not least because keeping a school was one of the very few ways in which a woman could hope to earn a respectable living, but accounts of what went on in them make depressing, and sometimes horrifying, reading."

"... The is best known for his reporting of the national disasters that struck England while he was keeping it: the , the , the . The record of these and other public events is used by historians and read with enjoyment by schoolchildren, because his reporter's eye was as keenly trained on them as it was on his private experience. What he was doing in such reporting was more significant than may appear at first glance, because the censorship imposed by the government of ensured that there no newspapers at this period except for a single government-controlled information sheet, the '. It meant that no proper record of public events was being kept, and even parliamentary debates were not allowed to be reported. ... As well as being a diarist, Pepys is regarded as one of the most important naval administrators in England's history. He rose to a position of eminence and power and was proud of his work in organizing, disciplining and developing the navy, and in insisting that shipbuilding must be properly funded. Those who most admire the administrator are sometimes ambivalent about the Diary."

"... There was a great demand for engravings of his portrait, and his head was being modeled by an admiring sculptor. This was Dickens nearly halfway through his life: he was twenty-eight in February 1840, and had another thirty years ahead of him. He was living in a country that had been at peace for a quarter of a century. There had been no foreign wars, and no revolution at home, partly thanks to the , passed under the old King, , in which parliamentary constituencies were redrawn and the electorate widened, cautiously. But the courts and alleys of London remained squalid with poverty, overcrowding and disease, and the rich in their great houses were unshaken Railways were changing the habits of the nation more than votes, and railway stations at and already connected London to the north and the ."

"With an English degree I found literary work, in publishing, mostly reading manuscripts, then in reviewing, occasional broadcasting and literary editing. Only in the early 1970s, as I approached forty, did I start working on my first , but I still had to earn my living by working as a literary editor. It was 1986 and I was in my mid-fifties before I could concentrate on full-time research and writing. I found great happiness in this work, and for the next twenty-five years I researched and wrote steadily. So at last I found my true vocation."

"… nearly all Emily Brontë’s biographers and scholars over the past century have been women. If you do spot a man in the mix, chances are that he has been shuffled off to the side, rather like , though hopefully without the urge to get drunk and set fire to himself. The only other author who has become the object of such an intense female pash in the last 200 years is Sylvia Plath, who happens to be buried less than 10 miles away from at . The parallels are uncanny. Separated by a century, both Brontë and Plath were poets who remain most famous for writing a single intensely autobiographical novel. There’s even a pleasing bit of intertextuality in the way that in 1956 Sylvia Plath actually managed to marry in the form of her own glowering man-of-the-moors, . Together the newlyweds tramped up to and wrote poems about it, an event that Hughes was still mulling over 40 years later in his valedictory '. Both Plath and Brontë died at the age of 30 and then only gradually started to attract the cult-like devotion of female fans, who responded rapturously to their heroines’ status as exiles from the twin kingdoms of heteronormative happiness and literary fame."

"It's a cliché, but I think it's an absolutely true one, that the Victorians were obsessed with class. They were obsessed with placing people in particular social categories."

"In the last week of June 1824 Thomas Carlyle, on the cusp of a brilliant literary career, bounced up to meet one of the country's reigning men of letters. You might assume that the twenty-eight-year-old had lots to talk about with the veteran poet and critic, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge was Britain's chief exponent of German Idealism, a tradition in which young Carlyle was himself fluent: his first book, published the following year, would be a biography of the philosopher Schiller. Yet far from a meeting of minds, this encounter between the literary generations might best be described as a repulsion of bodies. Carlyle was barely able to contain his shock at the ruin of the man who shuffled forward to greet him at 3, . Coleridge, he reported to his brother in an appalled post-mortem the next day, was a 'fat flabby incurvated personage, at once short, rotund and relaxed, with a watery mouth, a snuffy nose, a pair of strange brown timid yet earnest looking eyes'."

"In 1925 a man called Dan Rider was inspecting the pauper wards of in . He was a volunteer visitor, a member of the public charged with checking on the welfare of those unhappy souls who had been deemed insane and sent to what was still known colloquially as the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum. During his tour Rider 'noticed a quiet little man drawing cats': 'Good Lord, man, you draw like .' 'I am Louis Wain,' replied the patient. 'You're not, you know,' I exclaimed. 'But I am,' said the artist, and he was."

"The figure of the must be one of the most familiar and abiding images in nineteenth-century literature. We know her best in the form of the scandalous of Thackeray's Vanity Fair, or as Charlotte Brontë's , the plain orphan who eventually marries her employer, the mysterious . In addition, she appears in scores of other novels from high literature to sensationalist shockers and from Emma to '. Yet it is one of the great ironies of that we know virtually nothing about the 25,000 women who actually worked as governesses during the middle years of the century. Indeed, it is the very power of these fictional representations which has blunted our curiosity about the practice of educating girls at home during the Victorian period."

"By representing "home" — the place we go to be loved, nurtured and fed — has become a kind of symbolic mother to us all. She is also, of course, the symbolic mother that we feel we ought to be. Right through the last century, brides were given a "Mrs Beeton" on their wedding day as a to help them become the kind of woman that everyone, but especially their own mothers, expected. Young women setting off for married life in India, Australia or Canada were similarly presented with a "Mrs Beeton" by which it was hoped they would carry the mother culture far into places where previously only chaos and savagery — in other words, un-Englishness — had reigned. So there is a kind of pleasing logic to the fact that the original Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management of 1861 was written to plug a gap where existing maternal relations had broken down. In the mid-19th century, middle-class women were, for the first time in history, more likely than not to be living at some distance from their native communities. Rapid urbanisation and the arrival of the railways meant that married life now involved setting up home sometimes hundreds of miles from the house where you were born. Where once you had been able to pop next door to ask mother's advice on a baby's cough or the best way to stone currants, now there was no one to consult. It was to fill this blind spot that a 21-year-old newly married woman, Isabella Beeton, decided to compile an encyclopaedia of domestic know-how, creating a paper and print version of Mother."

"I was looking for a subject for my next book and failing to find one. My agent told me that during a recent lunch an editor had mentioned that he thought that the time was right for a new biography of George Eliot. The moment I started writing a biography I realised that the was made for me – or perhaps, more modestly, that I was made for the genre. Biography involves detailed with the ability to tell a jolly good story. And those are the two things I like best in the world."

"My grandmother was a cat lady. She actually bred s. She also had a lot of books around. So I grew up with that. And the thing is that I found them a bit frightening. ... there is always something slightly odd about Louis Wain's world. ... tensions in people society through cat society ..."

"In the five centuries since Columbus discovered the New World, savagery has been part of American life. There has been the violence of conquest and resistance, the violence of racial difference, the violence of civil war, the violence of bandits and gangsters, the violence of lynch law, all set against the violence of the wilderness and the city."

"... Throughout my writing life, travel has lent a vehicle in which to explore the inner terrain of fears and desires we stumble through every day. Writing about travel allowed flexibility and freedom within a rigid frame of train journeys, weather, and a knackered tent. The creative process is an escape from personality (T. S. Eliot said that), and so is the open road. And a journey goes in fits and starts, like life."

"... The Arctic is the lead player in the drama of , and s are its poster boys."

"What no one ever quite gets used to is the brutalizing effect of the wind. The average wind speed at McMurdo is ten miles per hour (12 knots). Extremely high winds, common all over Antarctica and terrifyingly swift to arrive, can freeze exposed flesh in seconds. That, effectively, is what constitutes frostbite, not initially a highly dangerous injury but one that can soon become fatal if untreated."

"I am very much a generalist as opposed to a specialist. It's rather unfashionable, but I feel someone's got to be one. So every book is a new departure."

"... One scholar says Tolstoy tells us to give away our money; Dostoevsky tells us to go to church; Chekhov says "I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do"; Gogol says "To hell with it." But they all deal with a fumbling search for certainties with which we all engage. And they are failures in one sense or another, as we all are."

"The travel writer Sara Wheeler prefers to travel alone. If she didn’t, you’d instantly volunteer to be her travelling companion. She’s an absolute hoot. But also deadly serious, fabulously well-read, thoughtful, self-deprecating – everything you’d want while slowly crossing some vast continent by bus or by train."

"We must put these things in the perspective of the age, its ubiquitous cruelty: flogging and beating were frequent, schoolmasters believed in beating learning into their pupils' heads — the exemplary was frequently beaten for her book. For scolds there were s or gags across the mouth, spiked chastity-belts for unreliable wives, s for women who made nuisances of themselves."

"I consoled myself with a rare bout of gossip with the piano-tuner, rather a dear little man, with up-turned, waved mustaches, bright bird-like eyes, a slightly lisping manner of speech, which recalled his great days in London and rubbing shoulders with celebrities. He had been piano-tuner to some well-known pianist — I think — of a previous generation. From him I heard the gossip of county society, and life at , our cathedral city."

"... I suggested that he write for Oldham's Press, which I was advising, a biography of Mountjoy: Elizabethan General. This was a congenial subject, which made the most of. ... ... 's long liaison with , the wife of , was recognised by society, until Mountjoy married the lady, when social humbug made a scandal of it. All this appealed to Cyril, who had a soldierly gallantry for the fair sex."

"The fact of our being an island has been a great advantage all through our later history. It has given us the benefit of a time-lag, imposed a bulwark between us and the too violent impact of forces from outside. We were given time to work out our own solutions, to absorb the shock of new ideas and movements, to bide our own time and interpose with effect in Europe when the moment was ripe. Since the last war people have got into the habit of underestimating the importance of our insularity; they have been apt to say that the development of air power has annihilated it. Air power has, of course, made an immense difference; but it has not annihilated it. It was our insularity that saved us in 1940."

"Within the the authorities had increasing difficulties to contend with from the puritans in these middle years of the reign: at their height from 1571 to 1584. The strength of puritanism was that it was the ideology, or if you prefer, the religion, of the forward-looking gentry and middle class."

"The most elaborate of these were those of Christmas 1594, of which we have a detailed, somewhat tedious account — for what amused the Elizabethans does not much amuse us (Shakespeare and Ben Jonson excepted)."

"So we were launched by the Elizabethan seamen upon our long career of adventure across the seas: adventure leading to discovery, discovery to exploration, exploration to colonisation and settlement, and so to Empire. So that you might say the British Empire was a product — almost a by-product — of adventure. It certainly was not planned; it came into being naturally, gradually, as the result of the adventurous spirit, the stout heart and courage of our forefathers looking for a livelihood and an outlet for their energy and spirits across the ocean."

"The truth is that all these men exemplify a triumph of will-power: that is what enabled them to succeed. The strain made some of them harsh — Grenville was harsh, and Bligh of the Bounty. Perhaps Drake too — as certainly he was in his execution of Captain Doughty in South America, before breaking into the Pacific. Still you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs. It is a mistake to be too soft; one can't expect to achieve anything without grit. That they all had."

"... Marlowe's plays had the advantage of being performed by the greatest of Elizabethan actors, then coming to the fore in his youthful prime. Similarly, Marlowe's plays, dominated by one towering character — Tamburlaine, the Guise, Barabas, Faustus — gave 's large-scale personality the scope it demanded."

"[[John Pilger|[John] Pilger]]'s early Cambodia films, Year Zero (1979) and Year One (1980), were very moving, made Cambodia and the horror of the Khmer Rouge rule a real issue for millions of people and raised a lot of money for Cambodia. But I thought both films were flawed by the equation of America and the Khmer Rouge. By skilful orchestration of emotions and actuality, Pilger seemed to show that, of governments, only the Vietnamese really cared about helping Cambodia and that official Western aid was designed to subvert rather than succour. I thought that this was dangerous nonsense, dangerous for hungry Cambodians, because the Vietnamese had put outrageous restrictions on aid. Also, to accept Vietnamese domination of the country seemed to me like accepting Soviet domination of Poland because they liberated it from the Nazis."

"[I]t has become customary in recent weeks to refer to [[Nigel Farage|Mr [Nigel] Farage]] as the most consequential politician since Margaret Thatcher. ... I knew Lady Thatcher, and to compare the two is to compare the Uffizi Gallery to a third-rate auction house."

"'Einstein is completely cuckoo'. That is how the cocky young Robert Oppenheimer described the world's most famous scientist in early 1935, after visiting him in Princeton. ... Einstein had been trying for a decade to develop an ambitious new theory in ways that demonstrated, in the view of Oppenheimer and others, that the sage of Princeton had lost the plot. Einstein was virtually ignoring matter on the smallest scale, using quantum theory. He was seeking an ambitious new theory, not in response to puzzling experimental discoveries, but as an intellectual exercise—using only his imagination, underpinned by mathematics. Although this approach was unpopular among his peers, he was pioneering a method similar to what some of his most distinguished successors are now using successfully at the frontiers of research."

"A physicist friend of mine once had a terrible spate of misfortune. Her flat was burgled, her cat was run over, and her grandfather died, all in the same week. Needing a bit of TLC, she went to see her professor, who offered three words of advice: “Do some physics.” For most people who are in need of consolation, I suspect physics is among the last things they would consider. , a former ' science editor, wants to persuade them that the branch of science so many people find soulless and intimating can offer much spiritual balm. He makes his case in what he calls a “love letter to physics”. ... For me, the main joy of physics is that it puts human beings so firmly in our place. Even if all of us – and every other living thing – died tomorrow, every quantum in the universe would carry on obliviously, doing its eternal, orderly dance to fundamental laws that we shall probably never discover. If you’re not a scientist, that thought may not be very consoling. But I’m just happy to keep on doing some physics."