Writing a Life: Hermione Lee, Daniel Lee and Rachel Holmes

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 6 October 2020

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Biographers of Tom Stoppard, Sylvia Pankhurst and a little known SS soldier compare notes. How does the process differ if your subject is alive, if their story has already been enshrined in history, if they were active in the Nazi regime? Anne McElvoy talks to three authors about researching and writing a life history and the journeys it has taken them on from a Nazi letter discovered in an armchair, to the play scripts by a living dramatist who fled Nazi occupation in Czechoslovakia and has become part of the British arts establishment to the campaigning travels of a suffragette to Soviet Russia, Scandinavia, Europe & East Africa.

Professor Dame Hermione Lee's latest biography is called Tom Stoppard: A Life. It's Book of the Week from October 5th on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. She has previously written on Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf and Penelope Fitzgerald. Rachel Holmes is the author of Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel. Her previous book was Eleanor Marx: A Life Daniel Lee has written The SS Officer's Armchair: In Search of a Hidden Life. He teaches at Queen Mary, University of London and is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to turn academic research into radio.

Delve into our website and you can find episodes exploring Suffrage history with Fern Riddell and Helen Pankhurst amongst the guests https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09th2dt Programmes about German history including Neil Mcgregor and Philip Sands https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b079mcgf or Sophie Hardach and Florian Huber https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0006sjx A debate about Jewish identity in 2020 with guests including Howard Jacobson and Bari Weiss https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000fwqd And there's Hermione Lee looking at Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00zt79p You can find more in the Prose and Poetry collection on the Free Thinking website.

Producer: Ruth Watts

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?
0:23.3	It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.
0:28.8	Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.
0:31.9	Hello, I'm Anne McHelvoy, and in this episode of the Arts and Ideas podcast, I'll be discussing the art of biography
0:37.7	with three authors of rather fine recent examples of the genre, just after this.
0:43.0	Why does music move us? How does it do it? Well, if these are questions that have been firing
0:48.6	you up, I've got the very podcast for you. I'm Tom Service from BBC Radio 3 and from Schubert's symphonies to
0:56.1	video game music from how to start a piece of music and when to end it. From background music to
1:01.9	bird song, from Beethoven to Beyonce, from Bach to the future. Thank you very much indeed.
1:08.0	The listing service podcast is your guide to how music works,
1:12.4	and all kinds of music too, the mastery and mechanics behind the magic. Just search for
1:18.5	the listening service on BBC Sounds and learn more about the music we all love.
1:24.4	My God, how does one write a biography? Over the course of tonight's edition of free thinking,
1:30.4	we'll be posing and attempting to answer that one question. It's a question that tonight's guests
1:35.3	have all wrestled with, and one of them, Professor Dame Hermione Lee, has written about extensively.
1:41.1	And so, to the business of the biographer. To get a sense of life as it was actually
1:46.0	lived, how do you go about constructing a narrative? How to balance public action statements in the
1:51.7	official record against private correspondence, diaries, the memories of others, and the memories
1:57.3	of the subject laid down for posterity. Staying mindful of the relationship of biographer and subject,
2:03.6	the challenge of giving an account of the life of another human being,
2:07.0	is not to be underestimated.
2:09.4	Welcome to my three guests today.
	...

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