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“... and one can’t help feeling how much more the Memoirs must mean to a French reader. All the same, Alex Andriesse has done a wonderful job suggesting the range of tone and feeling Chateaubriand offers, his shifts from the ecstatic to the dry, from the descriptive to the cryptic. Even in English he comes across as compulsively quotable, especially at his ...”

“... Elizabeth Hardwick​ was wary of biographers. She called life-writing ‘a scrofulous cottage industry’, a ‘consistent fiction’ masquerading as truth. Its practitioners were necrophiliacs ‘quick in pursuit of the dead’. In her book on Herman Melville, she wrote of the ‘violent exuberance’ that accompanied his rediscovery by critics in the 1920s: ‘He was unearthed … the whole skeleton, as it were, put under the floodlights, a penetrating radar giving the bones a voluptuous rebirth ...”