D J Taylor
Up At The Villa
A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers
By Michael Holroyd
Chatto & Windus 254pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
One might define the current relationship between the novelist and the biographer as a rather complicated game of dressing-up, in which each player’s aim is to put on most of the clothes that his opposite number has taken off. While a certain kind of novel has grown denser and more self-consciously tethered to the world it affects to describe (and thus gets commended for the diligence of its ‘research’), so ‘life writing’ has turned more eclectic, less constrained by chronological decencies and sometimes regarding even facts as a hindrance to its schemes. There have been ‘hybrid’ biographies, and downright ‘experimental’ ones (see, for example, Andrew Motion’s Wainewright the Poisoner). There have been biographies of places, and snapshot studies that attempt to prove some dramatic truth about their subject by focusing on a particular incident or an isolated stretch of time. The general effect, it might be argued, has been to enhance one form’s attractions at the other’s expense. Which is to say that a good deal of modern biography looks unexpectedly creative, while a good deal of contemporary fiction seems downright staid and too obviously plundered from the textbooks.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw
'Thirkell was a product of her time and her class. For her there are no sacred cows, barring those that win ribbons at the Barchester Agricultural.'
The novelist Angela Thirkell is due a revival, says Patricia T O'Conner (£).
https://literaryreview.co.uk/good-gad
'Only in Britain, perhaps, could spy chiefs – conventionally viewed as masters of subterfuge – be so highly regarded as ethical guides.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-spy-who-taught-me