Though just biographic record will touch the failings of the good and — Biography

"... We talked of biography.—JOHNSON. It is rarely well executed. They only who live with a man can write his life with any genuine exactness and discrimination ; and few people who have lived with a man know what to remark about him. The chaplain of a late Bishop, whom I was to assist in writing some memoirs of his Lordship, could tell me scarcely any thing ..."

"There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed."

"I am a biography nut myself, and I think when youre trying to teach the great concepts that work, it helps to tie them into the lives and personalities of the people who developed them."

"Talking of biography, I said, in writing a life, a mans peculiarities should be mentioned, because they mark his character. JOHNSON. Sir, there is no doubt as to peculiarities : the question is, whether a mans vices should be mentioned ... ... If a man is to write A Panegyrick, he may keep vices out of sight ; but if he professes to write A Life, he must represent it really as it was ..."

"The open-ended nature of biography is one of its mysterious attractions. No Life is ever definitive: it draws or rejects from past work, it reflects often unconsciously the concerns and questions of its own age, and it passes on something hidden to the future. Every serious attempt at an historic portrait of the dead will subtly absorb the and of its living author, however objective he or she sets out to be. This is precisely the strength, rather than the weakness, of its subjectivity."