ABSTRACT
Like nearly every biographer I have ever met, I never wanted this job. Then again, I never wanted to be a writer at all. What I wanted to be was a virtual time-traveler, who used books as time machines to move freely through history, soaking up unfamiliar atmospheres and trying on different manners and modes. Like many young people, I read biographies for the same reason I read historical fiction: because I found it easier to imagine these alternative worlds when I was seeing them through the eyes and experiences of an individual character. Historical conditions and causes were more vivid to me when a book employed a strong ‘focaliser’, to borrow a phrase from the narratologist Gérard Genette.1 I had no desire to be a biographer or a novelist, I just wanted to muck around in the past and that was the easiest way in.
