PositiveThe AtlanticIn a short book about biography, Hermione Lee, literary life-writer par excellence, offered two metaphors for the art at which she excels. One was an autopsy. The other was a portrait ... Lee is clearly no coroner, even when writing about the dead. Tom Stoppard is her first living biographical subject [...] and she concludes her portrait by lobbying posterity on his behalf ... His significance seems a strange thing to feel in need of proving. Surely if Stoppard’s reputation in postwar British theater weren’t secure, this giant biography—nearly twice the length of Lee’s last—would never have been undertaken ... In writing about Stoppard while he’s alive, Lee is not just keeping up with new output. She’s conveying the ways in which his past work remains potentially in progress—and the ways in which his own life, as becomes clear in his latest play, is a window onto the vagaries of history. Lee has said more than once that there is no such thing as a \'definitive\' biography. In Tom Stoppard: A Life, she proves that in the extreme ... When Stoppard read this biography, he told Lee that \'he is good at performing niceness, but he is not as nice as people think.\' For all Lee’s evident affection, she leaves that unwritten self just visible at the perimeter, living its part of the undefinitive life.
