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Hello, biography sells more books now than ever before. Last year... the and it's not just in Britain that life stories are popular. The United States

Library of Congress found recently that in the previous six months more people had

read a biography than any other kind of book. But what drives this fascination in the lives of others, lives which have often long since passed, and what's the role of the biographer who provides that account? Truthful collica or inevitably biased re-inventor. With me to discuss biography are three fine

practitioners of the art. Richard Holmes is the biography of Shelly and

Coleridge and his hugely influential book of 1984 footsteps was credited with changing fundamentally the way that

biography is written. He's just publishing the sequel, Side Tracks, explorations of a romantic

biographer. Nigel Hamilton is Britain's only professor of biography,

director of the British Institute of Biography, and also the official biographer of

Field Marshal Montgomery of Alameen.

Amanda Foreman is the biographer of the nakedly successful Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire.

Richard Holmes, Samuel Johnson put biography on the map as it were for modern Europe,

certainly for this country, with the life of Richard Savage.

What makes that work so distinctive and so important for biography?

There's been a tradition bubbling up at the beginning of the 18th century which is actually based on criminal

biography the Newgate calendar and so on popular pamphlets

of Rhodes and bagelons one of the most famous being Jonathan Wilde, the thief

taker who was a kind of double crook, very good subject for a biography.

Defoe wrote a series of pamphlets and Johnson...

...