[Download] "Truth to Life Twenty Years on (Essay)" by Nineteenth-Century Prose # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Truth to Life Twenty Years on (Essay)
- Author : Nineteenth-Century Prose
- Release Date : January 22, 1995
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 163 KB
Description
The editor has asked me for some reflections twenty years after publishing Truth to Life. I note first the extraordinary popularity of biography in the intervening years; it seems to have become the preferred reading of that important, though perhaps dwindling, class, the informed general reader. At any rate, publishers think so, for they produce a stream of biographies, of the famous and the obscure. When I was working on Trollope in the early '50s, I had two biographies at hand, one of which was only in part about him. Now there have been four biographies of Trollope within a few months. Not long ago, I was amazed to see a review article devoted to two lives of Harold Laski. It would perhaps be hard to convey to a reader who has never heard of Laski how unimportant he was; an undistinguished professor, much given to lying and fantasies of grandeur, who happened once to intersect with history. He is remembered, if at all, for two characteristic snubs, delivered to him by Clement Attlee, Prime Minister of Britain 1945-51. I have not read these two books, so do not know how successful they were in decking out a thin subject. The interesting thing is that they were published at all.