Our obituaries editor picks the five best biographies ever written

ALTHOUGH I WRITE biographies, as well as mini-biographies week by week in the form of The Economist’s obituaries, I’m not a great reader of them. Too often they leave me dissatisfied, feeling that despite heroic accumulations of detail I still have no real sense of the spirit, which is the life, of the subject. Autobiography, on the other hand, is my chief resource. It may be highly selective, too rose-tinted, or out-and-out distorted, but those failings in themselves are part of the life. Both sorts of biographies are on my list.