And Another Thing | 10 May 2008

Are there too many biographies? Thomas Carlyle thought so 150 years ago. ‘What is the use of it?’ he wrote growlingly. ‘Sticking like a woodlouse to an old bedpost and boring one more hole in it?’ He was then engaged in his 13-year task of writing the life of Frederick the Great, and spoke from a full and bitter heart. Since then over a million more biographies have been written in English alone. The public is to blame, as it is to blame for any other excesses, distortions, omissions and duplications in the book trade. I have been encouraged to write biographies, and have done six. Publishers will tell you that three in particular will always sell, no matter how many times they have been done before: lives of Byron, Mary Queen of Scots and, above all, Napoleon.

Here again, I am a sinner. At the urgent entreaty of a publisher, who wanted it for a ‘series’, I wrote a short life of Napoleon.