Volume 38, Number 19 · November 21, 1991
Folie à Trois
By Noel Annan
Politics, Religion and Love: The Story of H.H. Asquith, Venetia Stanley and Edwin Montagu, Based on the Life and Letters of Edwin Samuel Montagu
by Naomi B. Levine
New York University Press, 843 pp., $39.95
Modern biographies are suffering from elephantiasis. Their authors collect letters and documents, consult virtually every secondary authority, dead or alive, worthy or worthless, and then mention them all so that no one can say that any piece of evidence has been overlooked. They rarely ask whether all that labor is appropriate. Here is a biography over seven hundred pages long on Edwin Montagu; and it is not only the publisher but the author herself who has to ask on the first page, who was he?
Review, 3307 words
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