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A FROST PAPERBACK is a loved book which a member of the Frost family has checked for condition, cleanliness, completeness and readability. When the buyer collects their book, the delivery charge of £3.00 is not made

Biography is well recognised as a peculiarly British vice. This new anthology is a collection of essays by some of the best biographers now writing in Britain. They tell of the ups and downs of life writing: of problems with families and friends of their subjects, of shocking new discoveries, and of bitter professional rivalries. Essays in favour of biography, others that describe disenchantment with an attempt to capture another human being in the pages of a book. Published in the autumn of 2004 – to coincide with the appearance of the most important British publishing enterprise of the new century to date, the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography – Lives For Sale is full of amusing anecdotes and fascinating experiences retold by some of the masters of the form, including Michael Holroyd, Fiona MacCarthy, Graham Robb, Andrew Roberts, Hermione Lee, Margaret Forster, Jenny Uglow, Antonia Fraser, as well as contributions from the rising generation, and an essay by Beryl Bainbridge on ‘Waiting for the Biographer’.

Reviews:

• “an entertaining ragbag of very brief and light essays by biographers.” –The Spectator (UK) November 2004
• “wonderfully entertaining” –The Tablet (UK), November 2004
• “The story of the writing of a biography can be almost as enthralling as the biography itself, viz Adam Sisman’s tale of Boswell, who sacrificed his marriage to write his life of Johnson. Andrew Motision says writing Larkin’s life nearly killed him. So I relished Mark Bostridge’s late-summer series Lives for Sale: Biographer’s Tales.” — The Oldie

Mark Bostridge’s books include Vera Brittain: A Life, shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography Award, the NCR Prize for Non-Fiction, and the Fawcett Prize, and the bestselling Letters From a Lost Generation. He is currently writing a biography of Florence Nightingale