Arthur Bryant’s floating doters

BIOGRAPHERS OFTEN DELUDE THEMSELVES into believing that their books are “definitive” — the smaller the subject, the greater the delusion. No one can take out a patent on Joseph Stalin or Nelson Mandela, but down in the lower reaches of biography writers can become so proprietorial that all who come after them are viewed as interlopers. Try introducing a past and a present biographer of, say, Gladstone’s private secretary or Thomas Mann’s sister — I guarantee the responses will be frosty.

This was rather my feeling when, some years ago, I was contacted by a lady who said that she had a large quantity of papers relating to the historian Sir Arthur Bryant, about whom I had written a biographical essay in my 2014 book . I felt I had said everything that was worth saying about Bryant, as, presumably, had my three predecessors: Pamela Street, Andrew Roberts and Julia Stapleton. The only difference was that my correspondent did not wish to undertake a new biography herself: she wanted