Becoming Ella Fitzgerald
Judith Tick
WW Norton 529pp (hb) £30
Are historians necessarily good biographers? It’s an interesting question, not least because a biography of a near-contemporary subject might be expected to take their personal legacy into account; to paraphrase the author Angela Carter, a life well-lived is akin to planting a tree that will hopefully continue to grow and thrive even when we are no longer alive to nurture it.
For her part, Judith Tick is an