The word ‘biography’ can create as many different expectations as the word ‘Orwell’. There is ‘Orwell’ as Orwellian—the gloomy prophet-pessimist of Nineteen Eighty-Four, so it is said, though I see the book as Swiftian satire if only marginally more cheerful for that; and there is Orwell as ‘Orwell-like’, the essayist, the humourist, the humanist, the lover of nature and of all small, curious things. The word ‘biography’ can mean a memorial or a panegyric; it can mean a hatchet job, or it can simply mean a good read. Now, of course, the hatchet job, whether literary journalism (stemming from Lytton Strachey) or of political journalism (stemming from W.T. Stead) was itself simply a reaction both to the Moneypenny and Buckle-like monumental ‘good’ lives, in which as among Lutheran pietists all mundane facts are held to be equal and to be equally sacred and all lively facts are suppressed; and also a reaction to the mercifully shorter celebratory lives, exemplary lives, Robert Southey on Nelson or Samuel Smiles on the great explorers and inventors, often published in series well- called ‘Popular Lives’. This tradition has not died out, nor should it. ‘Let us now praise famous men’ and women indeed: ‘There is a time and place for all things’. I notice that Michael Foot now calls his Life of Aneurin Bevan in its paperback edition, ‘a polemical biography’. Perhaps he is reacting to some criticism by pedantic historians that his book was a trifle partial. And so splendidly it was. There is a place in our culture for holding up certain lives as noble examples, whether of Nye Bevan, the Queen Mother or Ms. Onassis, according to the reader's values. I do not wish to say that these are not biography, any more than to deny that their mirrorimage hatchet jobs are. They are precisely what many people still mean by biography. Names are not sacred; only actions are good or bad.

Others, I’ve said, simply see a biography as ‘a good read’ about an actual person, whether praising, knocking or tolerably fair. Wyndham Lewis once said that good biographies are like novels.