One of the pleasures of reading resides in the flourishing condition of biography. According to publishing statistics, biographies sell better than any other genre of serious literature. Some, such as Leon Edel’s five-volume life of Henry James or Michael Holroyd’s three-volume biography of George Bernard Shaw, not to mention Martin Gilbert’s monumental series on Winston Churchill, may seem so overwhelming as to tax even the most devoted student of other people’s stories. Really great biographies, however, such as these all plainly are, only hold their readers in thrall to the next instalment. It was a long wait from Edel’s first volume (1953), which got James to the age of twenty seven, to the final instalment (1972), but no reader once under Edel’s spell would easily have lost patience. Even then, Edel’s one-volume abridgment (1985), no doubt all that any reader but a fanatical Jamesian would now tackle, is arguably better still than the original work. But one could easily list a dozen other superb modem biographies H Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart, by Robert Bernard Martin (1980), for example, to mention only the one that has most recently come my way.

Peter Hebblethwaite records that, when he submitted one chapter of his new book, Paul VI: The First Modern Pope (Harper Collins, London, 1993, £35), to Archbishop Luigi Barbarito, Pro-Nuncio to Great Britain, for comment, he was told that it would not be possible to write a ‘true and objective life of a Pontiff’