The biographer's real business - if it is not too arrogant to say so - is simply this: to bring the dead… — Iris Origo Copy Share Image
Man you can define; but the true essence of any man, say, for instance, of Abraham Lincoln, remains the endlessly elusive and… — Josiah Royce Copy Share Image
All of us are many different people over time. We have our childhood selves, people that we remember, but they're very different… — Rachel Holmes Copy Share Image
The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets.… — Thomas B. Macaulay Copy Share Image
History is about life. It's awful when the life is squeezed out of it and there's no flavor left, no uncertainties, no… — David McCullough Copy Share Image
And when her biographer says of an Italian woman poet, 'during some years her Muse was intermitted,' we do not wonder at… — Anna Garlin Spencer Copy Share Image
Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full… — Janet Malcolm Copy Share Image
On the trail of another man, the biographer must put up with finding himself at every turn; any biography uneasily shelters an… — Paul Murray Kendall Copy Share Image
The history of food has never had a better biographer. Required reading for anyone who eats. — Dan Barber Copy Share Image
For me, it is about using everything that is there and using the gaps in the record, figuring out why the gaps… — Hilary Mantel Copy Share Image
To be a biographer is a somewhat peculiar endeavor. It seems to me it requires not only the tact, patience, and thoroughness… — Nancy Milford Copy Share Image
