Sunday, 24 October 2021

Is it ever right for biographers to make things up?

Joe Moshenska was the Miltonian biographer featured in the Guardian article ‘When Milton met Galileo‘ I posted on my blog 4 years ago.

In this review of his new book Making Darkness Light, he is getting some stick for “lacing a biography with imaginary events” e.g “that Milton sought to be a prophet”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/ever-right-biographers-make-things/

It’s on my Christmas present list and I am looking forward to finding out if it is ‘historical fiction’ rather than biography, and how it may be comparable with Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy