I sat with the team from Palmerston North City Library for this session; it was good to chat with a lively bunch of librarians and erstwhile bloggers. This was a ripper; chair Harry Ricketts observed that Simon Sebag Montefiore and Hermione Lee were pretty much doing all the work – this gave the event a natural flow. The hour was up in no time.

Simon talked about how he “loves the gallop of hooves” and the action packed narrative in his biographies. Hermione takes a more literary approach, befitting her subjects.

Both agreed that biographers need a bit of a ruthless streak, to get to the archival material, and to get information from eyewitnesses and those in the know.

And why do they write biographies when it is clear that it takes an incredible amount of work? Simon Montefiore felt the drive to “change the ways his subjects are viewed”. In the case of his biography of Catherine the Great and Potemkin, they had been portrayed as a nymphomaniac and a buffoon and he redressed the balance by copious use of archives and the thousands of letters between the two.

Hermione, as a literary critic and biographer, wants her readers to understand her subject’s work better and to therefore be inspired to read them and appreciate them.

And the title of this post comes from Simon’s lovely story about a rogue Russian archivist who wanted to make her disapproval of his research clear – she dropped a kitten on his head.

Simon

Hermione Lee