Just Had To

R.W. Johnson

The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Vol. III: Master of the Senate by Robert A. Caro

The French prefer an allusive style in biography, with as little as possible of the scaffolding of scholarship showing. Jean Lacouture’s magisterial De Gaulle is virtually unfootnoted, has only a small bibliography and contains many verbatim conversations or remarks by De Gaulle that we have to take on trust, as well as many ironic thrusts and tight logical turns which can nearly knock you off your chair. The result is an impressionistic Life in which little is settled beyond dispute. The British style is more careful and thorough, with the foundation work in sources revealed as proudly as any part of the superstructure. The aim is completeness and to settle things beyond doubt, but there is reticence even so. It’s not just that literary flourishes are avoided and psychobiography shunned, but that key debates can be carried on almost unseen in long afternotes. Even such an authoritative work as Philip Williams’s Gaitskell, with its unrivalled picture of postwar Labour politics, wholly omits Gaitskell’s colourful sex life. ‘I decided at the outset I wasn’t going into all that,’ he told me.

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R.W. Johnson is an emeritus fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. His new book, South Africa’s Brave New World, will be published by Penguin in the spring.

Just Had To

R.W. Johnson

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