One of the decisions that a biographer faces in writing a multi-volume study of his or her subject is that of where to divide the narrative. This seemingly prosaic decision in reality plays an enormous role in shaping how that life is interpreted, even within a narrative that is written as a contigu...
I must confess considerable exasperation with our seemingly inexhaustible appetite for biographies for certain subjects. This is for a variety of reasons; it reinforces the idea of a certain select group of (almost exclusively) white men at the top of the pantheon, it overshadows the many good books...