User:Sialhamza/sandbox

Gibbon was inspired to write The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire sitting on the steps of the Capitol at Rome one evening, listening to the sound of monks chanting vespers. My own inspiration to become a historical biographer came in rather less elevated circumstances, as a teenager one rainy Oxford afternoon: I began to read Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, and as a recent convert, was in particular fascinated by his essay on the worldly Cardinal Manning. This was going to be the life for me! Once back at school I plunged into further research in the convent library. A very different picture emerged. Gradually as I pursued the topic, I became aware of Strachey's daring sallies into "artistic truth" (as opposed to historical truth). Nevertheless I never forgot my original sense of being transported into a world more vivid than my own.

An ability to convey this sensation is, I believe, at the heart of the matter. If you, the biographer, don't thrill to your subject, you can hardly in all fairness expect the reader to do so. In a sense (not of course the commercial sense) the choice of subject is irrelevant so long as it meets that requirement. You could say that I was extremely lucky to choose Mary Queen of Scots for my first foray since there proved to be a world-wide public for the troubles of the ill-fated Queen. But you could argue equally that I made my own luck, since I had always been obsessed by Mary's story from childhood. Nor was success fore-ordained. It was, after all, the leading publisher Mark Bonham-Carter of (then) Collins who said to me when I confessed my project, "They say that all books on Mary Queen of Scots sell and no books on South America do", before adding with a laugh, "Perhaps yours will be the exception." Sign up to our Bookmarks newsletter Read more

Nevertheless I did have luck. In the 60s, so-called narrative biography was said to be out of fashion. Mary Queen of Scots was an early beneficiary from the fact that the public continued to have an appetite for it, so long as the research was felt to be solid.

The actual research for a biography - now that's a whole other matter. The paramount need for it - historical truth not Stracheyesque truth must be established - means that biographers discover for themselves the reality of Dr Johnson's wise dictum about the greatest part of a writer's time being spent in reading in order to write: "A man will turn over half a library to make a book." And what about those fabled things boasted of on blurbs: hitherto unpublished documents? Obviously it is every researcher's dream to discover such papers, and their discovery once again may make a project commercial which would not otherwise be so.

There is also no excitement like that of viewing the piece of paper on which the subject actually wrote. The delicate white gloves now demanded by Conservation made it particularly exciting when I inspected the single surviving Wardrobe Book of Marie Antoinette in the archives nationales in Paris - to say nothing of the presence of armed gendarmes behind me, quite ready to defend this treasure of France to the death (mine).

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At the same time I would issue a caveat about hitherto unpublished socuments. HUDs are not in themselves more valuable than the printed sources - it's a historical coincidence that one set has become known early on, the other not. One needs to evaluate them even more closely. Here I speak from personal experience. A series of chances led me to discovering some hitherto unpublished letters of Oliver Cromwell just as I was finishing my manuscript. I blazoned my finds across the text: only to realise at the proof stage, that they might be unpublished but they were not very important in the grand scheme of things ... an expensive mistake.

Where the perils and pleasures of writing historical biography are concerned, there are two perils which seem to me to raise points of principle. The first is the peril of anachronistic judgements. For example, in the 16th century more or less everybody took astrology seriously and more or less everybody enjoyed a jolly afternoon out to see the bears baited. It's no good dismissing the former as meaningless and cringing from the latter as disgusting. In the same way, political correctness is dangerous. The importance of James I of England's allegedly homosexual tastes is their political consequences if any, not an opportunity for a 21st-century historian to display liberal values. (Let alone the reverse.)

I would further cite the peril of hindsight. We may know that Henry VIII will marry six times, but he didn't, and he would have been amazed if it had been predicted at the time of his first marriage to Catherine of Aragon.

And the pleasures? Manifold! Principal among them however is the opportunity to lead a life less ordinary. As a biographer, I can rule over kingdoms, lead the cavalry into battle, patronise the great artists of the past and all without leaving my chair.

· Antonia Fraser has written more than a dozen award-winning biographies including Mary Queen of Scots and the six wives of Henry VIII. Her latest book is Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King.