ABSTRACT
Twenty-seven years ago the distinguished English biographer Robert Skidelsky (author of Keynes, in three volumes) rued the continuing lack of theorising in the study of biography and, as a consequence, its poor status in the academy.1 As Skidelsky put it in a sort of status report on biography in 1988, The Troubled Face of Biography (a book of essays resulting from an international conference on the subject): ‘Scholars are far from convinced that biography has any important light to throw on art or,’ he added, ‘history’. ‘Biography’, he summarised, ‘is still not taken entirely seriously as literature, as history, or as a cogent intellectual exercise’.2
