Ruth Scurr: evaluation

Transcript context

…Insofar as we make history more biographical, how would that bias history itself? Well, I don’t think history can be too biographical because, at the end of the day, we are interested in people who went before us and understanding the frameworks of their lives and the choices they made. I think it’s important to be as broad and inclusive in who we are interested in — that is very, very important to me. Certainly, it was one of the ideas behind the “shadows.” It was about the people that Napoleon’s shadow fell upon that I began, really, trying to think about him, to get away from the idea that he is the center, he’s the sun, he’s the ego, and that we can think about history as a series of great egos, great men. Obviously, that is something I am deeply opposed to. I’m very interested in trying to broaden the biographical approach. Many other people are doing this as well, which brings me huge pleasure: to actually acknowledge that every one of these iconic figures was situated densely amongst other people whose lives were actually as important to them as Napoleon or Robespierre’s was to them. What makes Keynes’s Essays in Biography so good? So there’s a biography of Marshall, of Malthus, right?…

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