British Political Biography as History

Abstract

On the evening of 5 June 1923, Art of Biography was spiritedly debated at the London School of Economics. The honors were shared by A. G. Gardiner, who had recently published a double-decker life of Sir William Harcourt, and by Philip Guedalla, who made his reputation with books on Wellington, Palmerston, and Napoleon III. The chair was taken by H. H. Asquith, an autobiographer whose volumes were twice as many, twice as heavy, and not half so popular as his wife's. With Guedalla's concurrence, Gardiner gave generously of his advice to any prospective biographers in the audience. Boswell and Carlyle, he declared, had achieved immortal successes because each had been anxious to do his best for his subject; Lytton Strachey, on the other hand, was too concerned with parading his own wit, and, consequently, never rose above caricature. Every biography, he insisted, like every good picture, was a portrait of two persons-the writer and its subject-and, in the vast majority of cases, it was