Remembering a Magus

Biography, that earliest form of story-telling, is a complicated art that has undergone several permutations of late. The arc of a life provides a narrative thread at its simplest: a birth, a life and a death that allow the author to praise or damn his subject and throw some light upon the age. A lot of the time, the venture is detailed and hagiographical, as James Boswell’s Life of Johnson was, or historical and instructional, as was Plutarch’s exemplary Parallel Lives. A couple of decades ago, biography went through a phase of being monstrously and exhaustively fat as was, most famously, Michael Holroyd’s monumental four-volume study of George Bernard Shaw. In retrospect, that work appears to have been a pinnacle of the literary form, the scale of which is not likely to be revisited. Now, as suits the age, the trend is for short, quickly digested biographies that make their single point hurriedly—as the Penguin Lives and now the company’s Canadian series...