Lee has also written lives of Elizabeth Bowen and Willa Cather and is working on one of Penelope Fitzgerald.

Other men might have written lives of Lord Nelson, but they did not; and all who write on Lord Nelson now, paraphrase Southey.

Tim Pat Coogan, who already has written lives of Collins and de Valera, here takes up the story from where these crucial histories left off.

He has written Lives of Beethoven, Michael Angelo, and Hugo Wolf.

Students of Biography will observe that in all well- written Lives attention is concentrated for the first few chapters upon two points.