It is a highly acclaimed biography of Britain s greatest living playwright that was written with his full co-operation.
But the subject of the book – Sir Tom Stoppard – yesterday said he has not read it properly because he considers it radioactive .
The 83-year-old has only dipped into Dame Hermione Lee s work – Tom Stoppard: A Life, published last year – as a memory aid for himself.
During a conversation with Dame Hermione in front of an audience at the Daily Mail Chalke Valley History Festival, he said: On a few occasions since the book was published, I had to turn to Hermione s book to find out something about myself.
Sir Tom Stoppard reveals he uses biography as aide memoire
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Philip Roth on 2005
Credit: AP
The first major biographical work on Philip Roth portrayed one of America’s greatest novelists as a borderline-sociopathic philanderer. It was hardly an impartial book but it certainly had a claim to insider knowledge. The author was Roth’s estranged wife, the actress Claire Bloom.
The publication of Bloom’s Leaving a Doll’s House in 1996 galvanised Roth into launching a search for an official biographer: somebody who would give readers the facts of Roth’s life from the horse’s mouth rather than that of his former stablemate.
As Roth later explained, if he had failed to appoint an official biographer there was a danger that somebody else would come along and fill the vacuum, writing a biography without consulting him and taking Bloom’s “serious and libelous distortions of reality and her numerous significant omissions as a starting point”. Late in his life he recalled: “I thought: ‘Someone’s gotta correct this story, or thi
Published:
11:30 AM March 3, 2021
Prof Hermione Lee who launches Cut Conversations with a discussion about her new biography of Sir Tom Stoppard
- Credit: John Cairns
Halesworth’s arts centre, The Cut, has announced a new series of fundraising events featuring today’s leading writers in conversation about their work and lives.
The series, called Cut Conversations, opens with Dame Hermione Lee on one of our greatest living playwrights, Sir Tom Stoppard.
The acclaimed biographer of Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee has most recently completed an 825-page definitive account of Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter, Tom Stoppard, A Life.
Stoppard is Hermione Lee’s first living biographical subject and, with unprecedented access to private papers, diaries and letters – plus countless interviews with figures ranging from Felicity Kendal to John Boorman, Trevor Nunn to Steven Spielberg – she has written a meticulously researched and hugely enjoyable portrait of
Published:
11:30 AM March 3, 2021
Prof Hermione Lee who launches Cut Conversations with a discussion about her new biography of Sir Tom Stoppard
- Credit: John Cairns
Halesworth’s arts centre, The Cut, has announced a new series of fundraising events featuring today’s leading writers in conversation about their work and lives.
The series, called Cut Conversations, opens with Dame Hermione Lee on one of our greatest living playwrights, Sir Tom Stoppard.
The acclaimed biographer of Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee has most recently completed an 825-page definitive account of Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter, Tom Stoppard, A Life.
Stoppard is Hermione Lee’s first living biographical subject and, with unprecedented access to private papers, diaries and letters – plus countless interviews with figures ranging from Felicity Kendal to John Boorman, Trevor Nunn to Steven Spielberg – she has written a meticulously researched and hugely enjoyable portrait of
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