The art of lives

... Book Review: A Book of Secrets - WSJ.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Mr. Holroyd's most lasting work will be his less monumental efforts, books that often star the biographer rather than the subject. "A Book of Secrets" is very much in this mode and is really about the romance of the biographer's quest—what Mr. Holroyd describes as "an intense involvement with absent people from the past." "Absent" is the operative word. Traces of a life can be found in novels, diaries, documents, places, paintings, sculptures, conversations, but how do they depict the material world of a life lived so long ago—much less the immaterial one of the imagination? This is the biographer's "intractable" task.