WRITING A BIOGRAPHY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 11 October 1938, Page 7

WRITING A BIOGRAPHY

“You learn more about writing a political biography by fighting an election than by sitting in a study," says Mr Philip Guedalla in ‘The Book Window.’ “One should write of what is within one’s own imaginative range. Most great English history has been written by men who were actually engaged in the history of their own day. Teaching history is a noble profession, but it is not necessarily connected with writing history. “Gibbon and Macauley were out in the world of affairs, so they made their history interesting—making it alive, as it was alive once. The untrue account is the dull account. To undramatise a dramatic event is inaccurate. The duty of the historian is to make his history move' as it actually moved once. “Personally I find more and more that I can’t >do this without going to the places where things happened, for places are historical documents as essential as are bits of paper. _I have been to about one-third of the places which come into the Peninsular War, and it gives a excuse for travelling. Broadlands is as important as the Palmerston papers: Apsley House and Walmer Castle as the Wellington despatches.”