How Does It Add Up?

Neal Ascherson

  • BuyThe Bard: Robert Burns, a Biography by Robert Crawford
    Cape, 466 pp, £20.00, January 2009, ISBN 978 0 224 07768 2

The late Bernard Crick, who had a fine and memorable funeral in Edinburgh the other day, left a legacy of sharp opinions behind him. Among the least popular was his opinion of the British tradition of biography, and his remarks remain a stinging nettle in the path of all ‘life-writers’. In the introduction to his life of George Orwell, Crick said that most biographies were just dressed-up historical novels. They drafted a nicely shaped psychological plot for their subjects, and then – whenever the subject failed to follow that plot – twisted or invented the evidence with ‘she must have felt nostalgic’ or ‘he would have indignantly rejected’. Crick declared that his own biography would be positivist. When he didn’t know what Orwell was doing or thinking, he would say so. If Orwell behaved with baffling inconsistency, Crick would not guess at his motives or cook up hypothetical excuses.

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[*] Robert Burns: The Patriot Bard by Patrick Scott Hogg (Mainstream, 368 pp., £17.99, November 2008, 978 1 84596 412 2).