Hesketh Pearson (1887–1964)

This is a cracking book!
When I started reading, I was aware that Sydney Smith was a clergy man and a wit. Hesketh Pearson writes a tome which brings Smith to life. There are many aspects of the man which are not fully covered, but I suspect that this will be the best biography of the man to which I shall be able to put a hand.
Smith comes out of this opus as a flawed genius: his Christianity appears to be of a lax kind: Pearson questions whether Smith believed in heaven and hell, he also show more quotes Smith as saying that religion was made for man and not the other way around. I am not sure that I could go quite so far, but there is a refreshing lack of dogmatism in the quoted writing and sayings of the great man. I can think of little better to say of this type of book than that it would make me readily devour anything else by or about the rev. Sydney Smith. show less

. . . In which Hesketh Pearson sets out to play Boswell to Shaw’s Johnson. The heft of the book reminds one of a standard “life and times” treatment, but the subtitle, Life and Personality, reveals that it is not. Instead, the style is more that of the “new” biography practiced in the first half of the twentieth century, although other examples of that genre are usually shorter.
The personality referred to in the subtitle sets the tone for the book. Shaw’s personality was his show more greatest work of art and flows into the most successful characters in his many plays. Pearson is clearly under the influence of that personality and is afflicted (unfortunately) by a love of Shavian paradox. For example: “No really intelligent person could possibly have taken an exception to a syllable in it [a war-time pamphlet of Shaw’s, Common Sense]; which must be why nearly everyone took violent exception to every syllable of it.”
In sum, this book both profits and suffers from the author’s close acquaintance with its subject. Much of it consists of anecdotes told by Shaw. Even parts not set off by quotation marks sound as if dictated by him.
This book caught my eye more than a half-century ago in the bookstore of one of the colleges I, a high school senior, had applied to. I bought it, made a couple of fitful starts, and have packed it with my other books and moved it several times. This year I decided to give it one last chance. It doesn’t take the place of a standard biography, even less the place of the best of Shaw’s plays (and prefaces) or music criticism. The abiding value of the book is in its character of “Bernard Shaw as I knew him.” show less

Not quite what I expected, I don't think. I knew this wasn't going to be a typical biography, just based on the slimness of the volume, but it sat on the TBR shelves for a few years because I really have to be in the mood for the tedium that comes with biographies. However, Pearson skipped the tedious bits and instead, this is more an overview of Conan Doyle's life. In that it's a great 'first look' at this magnificent author's life.

My problem, and hence the three stars, is that it's truly a show more mystery whether Pearson even liked Conan Doyle. This is not an unbiased look at a literary titan's life - it's totally biased. But which way? Throughout the text, Pearson is extolling Doyle's genius, praising his ability to write gripping tales, and at the same time calling him simple whenever he can. He uses the word 'simple', and I could give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he means 'free from guile' - which Doyle was - but he takes snipes at him in other ways too that makes me wonder.

Pearson continued to irritate me the further along in the text I went; he went off on a long diatribe about the difference between having an imagination and being fanciful. Apparently, Shakespeare had imagination, but Doyle was merely fanciful, as, apparently, was Edgar Allan Poe. He also kept referring to "the war of 1914-1918", or "the 1914-1918 war", refusing to call it World War I, or even the Great War. This bugged me more than it should have.

But the part that pissed me off the most was the last chapter where he tackles the elephant in the room - Doyle's embracement of spiritualism. It is, to put it mildly, extremely unsympathetic, unbiased and, frankly screw mildly, the man was sneering and contemptuous and couldn't have written it more condescendingly if he tried. He made me want to thump him right between the eyes for his extraordinary poor form. I could rant about this for ages, but I'll save time and just say, the last chapter cost him a star and a half.

It's an easy and informative read, but unless you can tolerate an author who talks out of both sides of their mouth in a completely biased fashion, there are probably better biographies of Conan Doyle out there. show less

This biography of Charles II was published in 1960 but has the feel of a book decades older. This could be attributed to the style of the hardcover, the look of the dust jacket, the black-and-white photographs of portraits, or the writing style itself. Nevertheless, it is a very readable book, telling the story of Charles' life from the death of Charles I to the death of Charles II with plenty of anecdotes and historical context where warranted, with a smattering of explanatory footnotes and show more a generous amount of narrative asides.

At some points the book could be considered excessive in its praise of Charles' tolerance and open-mindedness, or that could just be me wondering how such a tolerant, open-minded person could have actually existed in the world of the Restoration. The part of the book that deals with the struggles between the Whigs and the Tories makes worrisome reading, especially with regard to the unabashed zeal with which the Whigs declared war on Catholic conspiracies real or imagined.

The bibliography consists of "selected sources" in which the author lists which of the over 60 books he read on his subject were most useful to him in completing his own book. The footnotes that exist in the book are used more for explanation than citing sources, but Pearson does not make up conversations between the various historical figures in the book. The quotes used in the book appear to have been taken directly from the primary sources, which are mentioned whenever a quote is used (e.g. "Charles wrote to his sister about the issue, stating that…")

On the whole, this is a good biography of Charles II, and now I want to read more about his successors, especially Queen Anne. show less