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“... biography of Samuel Johnson is a call-to-arms for all makers of literary lives, and Adam Sisman, previously a biographer of A.J.P. Taylor, has taken on a genuine task, a presumptuous task indeed, to write a biography of the biography, in the hope of casting light on the very real subject of how to make a biographical subject real. His book ...”

“... Such is the stuff of which legends are made, as he well appreciated. In A.J.P. Taylor: A Biography Adam Sisman has done enough research to prune the dense foliage of legend which Taylor himself lovingly propagated through his peculiar mixture of vanity, perversity and desire to entertain. His autobiography of 1983, which might well have included a byline ...”

“... Regius Professor of Modern History, who kept a dossier on his activities for the next 25 years. Adam Sisman, Trevor-Roper’s biographer, has now used the dossier as the foundation for a short, spry book, The Professor and the Parson (Profile, £12.99). He doubtless felt encouraged, perhaps foredoomed, by letters Trevor-Roper received from well-wishers ...”

“... Smiley, or a conspiratorial mindset, to divine that something odd is going on behind the scenes of Adam Sisman’s new biography of John le Carré. In the past, would-be biographers have been discouraged from poking their noses into the business of David Cornwell, the former spy who has written under that curious pseudonym since 1961. Robert Harris chose ...”

“... penchant for academic squabbling and a string of unconventional marriages. But three biographers? Adam Sisman came first, publishing a lively and well-written study in 1994. Although the scholarly achievements and disappointments were chronicled, Taylor’s personality and public engagements – with the Communist Party (briefly) in the 1920s and the ...”

“... using rudeness as a disguise for nastiness.’ Habakkuk’s first guess is very sharp. Reading Adam Sisman’s steady, carefully fair and gracefully written biography, I kept coming back to it. Sisman declares at the start that he knew and liked Trevor-Roper and that in writing this Life ‘I may have been ...”

“... he also produced, a tone of condescension has tended to accompany Goldsmith’s name, so that Adam Sisman in his book on Boswell could describe Goldsmith as ‘an awkward, improvident and slightly ridiculous Irishman … whose genius [Johnson] nevertheless acknowledged and championed’ – though in fact almost every reference to Goldsmith in the ...”