Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our

terms of use, please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for. I hope you enjoy the program.

Hello, biographies sells more books now than ever before. Last year, people in this country

alone spent £150m on 12 and a half million copies of biographies. And it's not just in Britain

that life story is a 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 colliker or inevitably biistry inventor.

With me to discuss biography are three fine practitioners of the art. Richard Holmes is the

biographer of Shelley and Coleridge. And his usually inferential book of 1984 footsteps was

credited with changing fundamentally the way that biographies 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 Alamein. Amanda Foreman is the biographer of the

naked list 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'd 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,

confessions, rogues and vagabonds, 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, it's a point when fiction and biography are, you know, overlapping

...