In the astute and authoritative new biography, Tom Stoppard: A Life, Hermione Lee wrestles it all onto the page. At times you sense she is chasing a fox through a forest. Stoppard is constantly in motion — jetting back and forth across the Atlantic, looking after the many revivals of his plays, keeping the plates spinning, agitating on behalf of dissidents, artists and political prisoners in Eastern Europe, delivering lectures, accepting awards, touching up scripts, giving lavish parties, maintaining friendships with Pinter, Vaclav Havel, Steven Spielberg, Mick Jagger and others. It’s been a charmed life, lived by a charming man. Tall, dashing, large-eyed, shaggy-haired; to women Stoppard’s been a walking stimulus package ... Her Stoppard book is estimable but wincingly long; it sometimes rides low in the water. The sections that detail Stoppard’s research for his plays can seem endless, as if Lee has dragged us into the library with him and given us a stubby pencil. Like a lot of us during the pandemic, Tom Stoppard: A Life” could stand to lose 15 percent of its body weight.
... empathetic, meticulous ... Ms. Lee, a formidable literary scholar, discusses the plays at length but warily. Not every line her subject wrote is golden, but she seems chary about delivering negative criticism. And it seems clear that the two of them agreed that certain personal subjects should be off-limits ... One feels that Ms. Lee, like Boswell writing about Johnson, might have stashed away a sizable file marked Tacenda—'things to be silent about.' But there honestly doesn’t seem to be much in the way of dirt to dig up. Mr. Stoppard’s romantic breakups have been amicable, and friends and colleagues speak of him in the highest terms. He appears to be genuinely kind, as well as self-controlled and well-behaved.
On nearly every page of Hermione Lee’s biography—the life as it has been, not as re-imagined—there is something arresting ... These things alone would be enough to make Lee’s account reverberate. In fact, her reach is longer and more surprising. Some writers would have gone in for frisky ventriloquy: firework phrases, overarching philosophical questions, a jostle of jokes, rug-pulling, slippage between time schemes. Lee has none of that. She is assured enough to seem ‘trad’ (a word Stoppard has used about himself), arranging her giant mass of facts chronologically over 977 pages, with no muddy sentences. Yet though the prose is free of theatrical frissons, the structure works like a play. The evidence is in the action. Arguments are thrown up by juxtaposition and contrast. Room is left for doubt—again in Stoppardian fashion ... Lee writes intensely about the way Stoppard’s late recovery of his family history disturbed his view of himself and what surrounded him. The significance of her book is more than theatrical: it is a chronicle of secrets, of refugees—and of England when it was a refuge ... Lee is not inclined to wrestle with the objections of critics: the choppiest notice she quotes comes from Stoppard himself, which doesn’t really count (he calls his Rough Crossing ‘almost tosh’). One of the achievements of her book—that of wiring the reader into Stoppard’s intentions—entails a limitation. It is almost impossible not to read the aim into the finished work: it has the same effect as reading a script just before seeing a play.
Lee...builds an ever richer, circular understanding of his abiding themes and concerns, of his personal and artistic life, and of his many other passionate engagements ... Lee’s biography is unusual in that it was commissioned, and published while its subject is still alive. Lee is a highly acclaimed biographer whose rigor and integrity make her decision to write under such conditions surprising ... Lee is frank and thoughtful about the challenges of writing about a living subject. She is aware, as the reader will be, that her interview subjects do not want to speak ill of a friend and colleague who is still among them. In addition to the almost unrelievedly positive portrayal of Stoppard, the seven-hundred-fifty-plus pages of this volume might have been somewhat condensed, were its subject no longer living, thereby rendering the biography easier to wield and to read. In spite of these quibbles, this is an extraordinary record of a vital and evolving artistic life, replete with textured illuminations of the plays and their performances, and shaped by the arc of Stoppard’s exhilarating engagement with the world around him, and of his eventual awakening to his own past.
... magesterial ... we get glimpses of the possibilities of a life in art, and its limits ... When I finished the Stoppard biography I was filled with sadness: Reading about his late-life discovery of his ancestry makes it impossible not to wonder what could have been, what kind of person (and writer) he would have been if he had known sooner.
Except for some over detailing of some of Stoppard’s important plays, Lee turns in a masterful performance of the biographer’s craft ... Some of Lee’s granular detailing of the nine-hour opus The Coast of Utopia, chronicling Russian history, real-life characters and literature, on top of the circumstances of Stoppard writing it, nearly sabotages the pulse of the whole book midway through. In contrast, Lee’s crisp account of Stoppard’s next play, Rock & Roll, jumps it back on Lee’s mainline narrative track. Also fascinating is Stoppard’s emotional journey to embrace his Czech-Jewish heritage and what happened to his family.
Lee does her best to scour Stoppard’s life and 50-year career for that human fallibility, and while at 750 pages (plus notes) Tom Stoppard can feel as daunting as one of the master’s more vexing theatrical works, it never treats (as so many biographies do) the fame and accomplishment of its subject as foregone conclusions. Instead, Tom Stoppard remains alive to the unlikeliness of Tom Stoppard’s career from the very beginning ... [Tom Stoppard] encourages the reader to return to Stoppard’s work in ways that are richly rewarding. Lee gives wise, learned readings to each major play (and a number of minor ones), teasing apart their themes, interpreting their theatrical gestures, and placing them cleverly in the context of their author’s life and work.
Stoppard emerges from this deeply sympathetic, even forgiving, biography as a shy man who has found a way to show off; a man who can’t quite believe his luck but can’t quite believe anything else, either ... It is tempting to see 'Hermione Lee' as one of his greatest creations—a professor who knows more about a playwright who writes about professors than he knows about himself, a narrator who understands about unreliable narrators and isn’t fazed by them, a reader who always gets the joke. And she appreciates the theatre and its lore without being a luvvie ... It seems unfair that a man of such outrageous gifts should also have been allowed to magic up the perfect biographer to write his life ... Lee’s biography is perceptive, knowledgeable, stylish and very long. The only times I found my mind wandering to the prospect of interval drinks were during the slightly breathless (and hugely detailed) descriptions of Stoppard’s social life once he became a celebrity ... Readers who, by contrast, like their biographies to romp along from lunch party to lunch party may find that Lee’s long analyses of the plays clog the action, but for my money her astute and unfailingly clear accounts of Stoppard’s complex creations are among the great strengths of this exceptional biography. Her attentive exposition of the themes and intricate plot of Arcadia is almost worth the price of admission by itself; Stoppard has often been criticised for being 'heartless' or too purely 'cerebral', but it is one of Lee’s several literary-critical triumphs to identify the emotions that drive so much of his work[.]
... a comprehensive and endlessly fascinating biography of one of the major figures of contemporary film and theatre ... What emerges from Lee’s biography is the portrait of a singularly gifted artist and human being ... A perfect meeting of the artist and Lee’s inestimable diligence.
This is a hugely impressive work. Lee’s book has the scope of a novel; it is superbly researched and written with a rare empathy and understanding of human nature ... Hermione Lee has done as well anybody could to bring this fundamentally private man to light. But the core of Tom Stoppard remains hermetic, sealed. His biographer clearly shows he is fundamentally happiest when he is on his own, working through the night on his latest play ... He is a great playwright, and this is a great biography.
... a prodigious achievement. It is also a challenging read, partly because of its excessive length and partly because it bulges with often needless detail. In a sense, though, those are its strengths. Stoppard’s life will not need writing again ... Lee offers no adverse criticism of his work, but quotes plentifully from those who do.
... shrewdly judged and (aside from a few redundant details) well written, with the gossip of a celebrity biography and sympathy for what a life’s work really means ... The biographer’s modesty is becoming, but her book presents a commanding case for Stoppard’s greatness as a man and an artist. The book is long but not too long, elegantly shaped and verbally astute, even at times poetic in its evocations of theatre’s evanescence. And such evanescence is Stoppard’s very subject, making the glimmer of life beautiful even as it disappears ... Lee offers superb readings of Stoppard’s many works with stories of how they came into being and the talented personalities involved in mounting any play—these amount to a Who’s Who of modern theatre, actors, directors, moneymen, technicians ... Lee writes of all this with such skill that it never becomes maudlin, never seems to pry more than necessary into the man’s privacy, never tries to sell us a psychological bill of goods. Her book contributes to the best writing about world theatre since World War II, a kind of Elizabethan Age in which a vital theatre shows civilization to itself.
When Tom Stoppard asked Hermione Lee, the distinguished Oxford literary critic, to write his biography, he gave her access to a wealth of materials and permission to quote from them; he also put her in touch with his collaborators, colleagues, friends, lovers and family. The resulting Tom Stoppard: A Life, is a comprehensive and endlessly fascinating biography of one of the major figures of contemporary film and theatre ... A perfect meeting of the artist and Lee’s inestimable diligence.
Lee's tome immediately announces itself as the life of Tom Stoppard, and one trawl through it really isn't sufficient to absorb fully all the information and exegesis contained therein ... You want romance or the whiff of scandal? Lee doesn't disappoint ... Lee tracks with remarkable ease both the life and the art of a man resistant to undue examination who has submitted here to one of the fullest biographical excavations of recent times. And if you sometimes need to put the book to one side simply to absorb the density of material, you return to it as you might to a fresh Stoppard opening with unbridled avidity[.]
In 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.
No one does literary biography better than Hermione Lee ... while reading Lee’s biography, I kept thinking of Auden—similarly generous, similarly brilliant as a craftsman, similarly unafraid of burdening his lissome language with the heft of ideas.
Veteran biographer Hermione Lee’s massive new tome follows Stoppard through more than 80 years in meticulous detail ... the biography provides information in occasionally exhausting and unnecessary abundance. However, this wealth of material gives a vivid sense of Stoppard’s glamorous social life, enduring personal and professional relationships and political commitments ... The key test of an artist’s biography is how well it handles the art, and Lee gets good marks here ... Lee’s thorough exegeses of his plays make palpable the intellectual and artistic aims that unify them. She weaves these commentaries into an equally thorough chronicle of Stoppard’s personal life ... Lee doesn’t pretend to be entirely objective. She tells us that Stoppard, now 83, asked her to write this biography, and her respect and affection for him are evident throughout. There is undoubtedly more to learn from a harder-edged, more critical biography by someone unconcerned with the subject’s reaction. But that doesn’t diminish the value of this intelligent, admiring tribute to a playwright who remains a vital figure in international theater after more than 50 years.
Domestic arrangements are usually treated with great tact in Tom Stoppard: A Life, a biography which, although immodestly long and massively detailed, manages to avoid tabloid speculation. That it succeeds in establishing a relation between the man who sat down to breakfast and the formal completion of his ideas is all the more remarkable given Stoppard’s publicly avowed hostility to the genre ... [the] biography becomes theatre history, invaluable to the expert, potentially gruelling to the amateur. Either way, it takes up space. At the same time, Lee’s academic skill in tracing sources pays off with a writer who is so very frank about his inspirations ... In the immediate context, there is a fascinating instance of 'doubling' as it operates between playwright and biographer, who mirror one another in their concern with 'the relation of the written to the lived life'. Of course, in many ways the task of the biographer has been unlike that of the playwright as she searches for an almost therapeutic continuity in the factual life of someone notorious in his own narratives for jaw-dropping jolts ... The biographer is most present and even more impressive in her transparent understanding of the frustrations of her lot. Reservations come together, in a quietly moving, semi-resigned coda in which she acknowledges the power of Stoppard’s own beliefs ... At just under 1,000 pages, this biography is an alloy ingot. Much of what it contains is gold-dust—bright, airy, precious—but there are particles of considerably darker material. The contrast is optical, theatrical. All those marvellous plays and now this prodigious book—how lucky can you get?
About Shakespeare we famously possess a small, precious handful of facts. In her encyclopedic new biography Hermione Lee seems to provide several million about Tom Stoppard. She greets us, rather forebodingly, with a genealogical tree, as if the extended Stoppard family were a medieval royal house. The book’s chapter heads tease us with delicious epigraphs, but to find the sources of those quotes you have to flip to the back and ransack the microscopic endnotes. These are quibbles. The lack of an editor’s blue pencil is not. In the course of 750 pages of text we get not only detailed play sources, production histories and migraine-inducing plot summaries (one of them eight pages long), but seemingly everything Stoppard ever wore and every room in every house he ever bought and every 'posh' friend he ever made ... Tom Stoppard is every bit as informed and intelligent as any Stoppard play. If only it were as pointed or as agile. Stoppard himself, dodging puckishly, seems to get lost amid the facts.
Lee is no real intruder. For seven years she has shadowed Stoppard’s life, and the result is a scrupulously authorised biography. It suffers from the usual drawbacks that come with such access: Lee minimises Stoppard’s flaws, raves over his literary work and obsesses about his 'gorgeous-looking' youthful appearance. In return she gets to reveal a cornucopia of personal notebooks, literary letters, and even early love poems, shedding unprecedented light on one of the great names of a generation ... There is little scandalous here. As literary history, Lee’s biography never disappoints ... As literary criticism, it is frustrating ... Lee gives her own interpretations, but barely acknowledges the vast body of work by other scholars. She has scant time for professional theatre critics and rarely references any by name, unless those names are Tynan or Billington ... sensitivity to political and historical context that elevates Lee’s biography above any lapses ... She highlights potentially racist or sexist jokes, then shrugs at each as 'of its time' ... Yet her research is encyclopedic, her hero charismatic, her scope expansive ... Hers is an essential contribution to theatre history.
... excellent and exhaustive, but sometimes too spellbound ... though [Lee] may also wish to garland Stoppard’s life and legacy with a sense of resolution, it’s not her prerogative to prop him up as a sympathetic or romantic figure. Not all brilliant lives thrill and seduce their audiences in a matter of minutes; some are long, guarded, and appropriately dull.
Lee’s biography captures Stoppard’s humour and kindness, his voracity for knowledge and his sociability. It throws light on his early life in London and his taste. When analysing the work Lee can get bogged down: the list of influences on Jumpers takes up most of page 236. And the writing could do with a bit more zest and brio. But anyone who wants to know about Stoppard will find most of the answers here. He’s succumbed to biography at last.
... dauntingly detailed ... Lee meticulously fleshes out the life that Stoppard himself describes as lucky ... the disconnect between the playwright’s success and family history hovers over this biography just as it did over Stoppard’s life. That is until he — and so also Lee — can ignore it no more ... Though Stoppard is still going strong, the play serves as a satisfying final chapter to Lee’s book, drawing together as it does the frightening first section of Stoppard’s life and his most recent ... as a guide to understanding one of the greatest dramatists of this or any other time, the book is indispensable. It is difficult to imagine that a life could be better known and understood.
I don’t think that Lee gets him wrong at all ... This is a biography that charts not just physical journeys but also the journey from blindness to self-knowledge ... While Lee’s book offers few new revelations, its achievement is the rounded portrait that emerges, that of an artist whose work has become ever more interesting the more he has been present in it ... While sometimes the meticulousness feels like the mere accumulation of trivia, on occasion it is illuminating ... As you might expect from an authorised biographer, Lee is sometimes a little breathless—it seems like she has fallen for Stoppard’s legendary charm ... Lee’s accomplished biography suggests that while the playwright who understands his own mystery and his own history is no less alone, he is a much more potent artist than the one who refuses to reflect upon the self.
Hermione Lee’s immensely long Tom Stoppard: A Life is expert, engrossing, entertaining and sympathetic to its subject ... She is better on the life than on the plays. Her criticism is a matter of inviting every possible interpretation to the party, and, increasingly, summarising the (not particularly enlightening) first-night critics. But her biography is long enough to include some wonderful marginalia ... Here, then, is the life, as well told as it’s ever likely to be. Now we know about his circumcision, his dental implants, the laser eye treatment, his Type-2 diabetes, his cronky knees, his smoker’s breathlessness. But the play’s the thing.
Tom Stoppard: A Life, has finally appeared. The book dresses out at almost 900 pages. This will be a cause for celebration among the many fans Lee has garnered with her other biographies ... This is about as authorized as an authorized biography can be ... Throughout the book, Lee perceptively discusses Stoppard’s work ... As so often happens in authorized biographies, readers are regularly subjected to appointment calendars in place of historical narrative ... There’s virtually nothing in Tom Stoppard: A Life that reflects even poorly, let alone damningly, on its subject. Is that because Stoppard has no flaws? Or is it because Lee would rather not speak ill of her friends, several of whom she thanks in the book’s acknowledgements, including Stoppard’s third wife and his lawyer? Time will certainly tell.
... an authoritative biography of this celebrated writer may seem premature. But the highly accomplished biographer Hermione Lee, at Stoppard’s behest, has produced just that. Tom Stoppard: A Life is a capacious and exhaustive book that attempts to infiltrate his art while chronicling his life’s journey—and what a journey it has been ... The most absorbing parts of Stoppard’s story involve his rediscovery of his Jewish roots and the ways he has indirectly mined his own family’s experiences in his work ... While Stoppard has often been accused of being an overly clever or cerebral playwright who avoids the personal and the emotional in his work, Lee makes a solid case for the true depth, as well as the surface brilliance, of his enduring plays. Mike Nichols, another émigré genius of the theatre, called Stoppard 'the most expressive playwright of our time . . . the only writer I know who is completely happy.' Tom Stoppard: A Life affirms that appraisal.
Lee [...] seems inspired [...] to leave no stone unturned in a 750-page tome that is exhaustive – and only occasionally exhausting ... Perhaps it’s a testament to the likelihood that Stoppard’s importance will endure, that upon finishing a 750-page book about his life and work, I was left thinking that Lee’s biography was likely far from the final word on this guy.
[Lee] probes deep into the emotions that drive Stoppard’s works and her literary-critical readings of his works supplement the biographical details. Those not as familiar with Stoppard’s oeuvre will get a very clear idea about his versatility ... Lee provides a rounded, but mostly positive, account of Stoppard’s life and work.
... definitive ... a case study in the joy and gratitude that comes, or ought to, with being English ... A small-type listing of Stoppard’s credits covers nearly two pages, yet Lee makes room for at least a brief discussion of seemingly every project, even some of no consequence ... It’s refreshing that Lee avoids the biographer’s trap of subject-loathing ... One finishes the book in a state of immense gratitude that Stoppard exists.
Hermione Lee, who had captured the lives of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather in revelatory detail, has chosen playwright Tom Stoppard as her next subject. Or rather he chose her ... Stoppard, who had derided biographies, asked the great Professor Lee of Oxford to write his life. She accepted. Stoppard is one of those rare playwrights like Shaw, Brecht, Pirandello, Pinter whose very name becomes an adjective summoning up the world they’ve created on stage. Shakespearean! ... What tack would Lee take in this biography of her first living subject and first male? ... Lee tells Virginia Woolf’s life in a kaleidoscopic fashion. She tells Stoppard’s in a straightforward chronology ...
Lee's biography, ultimately a warm one, could have done with editorial reduction in minutiae, for example in regard to his medical history, his office routines, global travel, honours received, celebrity lifestyle and country house refurbishments ... Lee does, however, get as far as anyone probably can to the 'real' Tom Stoppard, who once said he was. 'a bounced Czech', before this term was later applied, in a different context, to Robert Maxwell.
Lee...is the perfect choice to write about Stoppard's riveting life ... Lee's knowledge of all the key players and discussions of Stoppard's writings are models of exposition, capturing a personality that is generous, supportive, and, well, fun ... A major biography of a major, and appealing, literary figure, this study will jump off the shelves.
Playwright Tom Stoppard’s brilliant career gets the treatment it deserves in this authoritative (if overlong) biography ... her finest achievement is her analysis of his plays’ interconnections with philosophy, history, politics, and science. Missing is an in-depth account of Stoppard’s inner struggles ... Lee brings her readers as close to a literary genius as most of us will ever get.
... [a] thorough, sympathetic, and eminently readable text ... Lee carefully unwinds autobiographical links between her subject’s life and works ... As Lee masterfully explores both her subject’s life and work, she portrays a uniquely talented writer fully in tune with a wide variety of influences ... a biographical masterpiece ... Authoritative and exhaustive—another jewel in Lee’s literary crown.
