ABSTRACT
Bernard Crick drew back from subtitling his biography of George Orwell a "Life and Times" on the sound theoretical principle that "such a formula, unless a man has a great effect on events, is mainly padding." The crucial task in writing biography and history is to address the institutional conditions which bear on the making of reputations while retaining the generosity of spirit to recognize the heroic in its many guises. "Issues" have to do with institutions and their interpenetration, transcending the individual's local environments and pertaining to a society's organization and history. Mediating this rich field of relations between the self and social structure is the social group, that pivotal region in which the formation of self-images and public images is endlessly renegotiated and transformed. Literary transfiguration is, then, a process with a large institutional component.
