COMMENT: Podium - Do We Need to Know Every Detail of a Life? Nigel Hamilton ; Taken from a Lecture by the De Montfort University Professor of Biography and British Institute of Biography Director

Hamilton, Nigel, The Independent (London, England)

PUBLIC FASCINATION with the private as well as public lives of individuals has, in the West, now reached almost epidemic proportions; the press today provides not so much the rough page of History, as in my youth, but the rough page of Biography: in interviews, articles, portraits, exposures, revelations.

At the start of a new millennium, almost anything goes, biographically speaking. Whether it's oral sex in the White House, or Jeffrey Archer's dinner dates, or the frustrated fecundities of Gilbert and Sullivan. We want to know, and we feel somehow we have a right to know: because biographical truth - whatever that means - has become deeply, deeply important to us, as …

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Publication information: Article title: COMMENT: Podium - Do We Need to Know Every Detail of a Life? Nigel Hamilton ; Taken from a Lecture by the De Montfort University Professor of Biography and British Institute of Biography Director. Contributors: Hamilton, Nigel - Author. Newspaper title: The Independent (London, England). Publication date: March 3, 2000. Page number: 4. © 2009 The Independent - London. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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