Biography
Winners:
- Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life
Shortlist:
- Rosemary Ashton, George Eliot: A Life
- Flora Fraser, The Unruly Queen: The Life of Queen Caroline
- James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett
Read more about this topic: 1996 Whitbread Awards
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“The best part of a writers biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (18991977)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (18851967)
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)