03-05-2025
Britain was obsessed with Princess Diana — not any longer
The traditional biography is dead. That soup to nuts, start with the birth, end with the death, 'all that David Copperfield kind of crap', as Holden Caulfield put it in The Catcher in the Rye, 'but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.' Him and publishers alike.
Writers have been playing with the biographical format for a long time, from Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy to Alexander Masters's Stuart: A Life Backwards. The vogue today is, instead of getting bogged down in the subject's life, to focus on their place in cultural history. The great benefit to readers is that biographies are no longer just about one person, but about all of us. 'How does this relate
