Harmless Dragons

Mr. Peter C. Newman, the writer, who is known for his portraits of famous politicians and business people, has now turned the spotlight on himself in a 700-page autobiography.

Here Be Dragons: Telling Tales of People, Passion and Power is a book of harmless chatter, but it still manages to disappoint. It suffers from all the usual faults that find their way into autobiography—industrial-quantity name-dropping, unimportant detail, elaborate flights of self-justification and too many pictures from the family photo album. But there is an additional, more serious problem. Unlike the subjects of his other books, Newman is not a famous politician or business person. He’s just a writer who has lived an active, work-centred and generally unremarkable life. So if the book is to be of interest to more than family and friends, Newman must meet the double challenge of inventing someone who is worth writing about while providing us with his signature commentary on that...