Dr Samuel Johnson: 'nobody can write the life of a man, but those who have eat and drunk with him'
© Mary Evans Picture Library

One of the earliest biographers was Plutarch, who lived in Greece in the first century AD. In his Lives, on 48 Greek and Roman men, he blithely focused on personal details and anecdotes at the expense of tedious historical records. His vivid portraits appealed to generations of readers: they were translated into English 1500 years after his death and inspired the flawed heroes of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra.

The first biography in the modern sense was probably Samuel Johnson's Life of Richard Savage, published in 1744. Johnson vividly recreated the life of his friend, a poet and hell-raiser who died in poverty. Johnson drew on his own memories to evoke Savage, and was later quoted as saying 'nobody can write the life of a man, but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him'.

Johnson's friend and travelling companion James Boswell went on to write the even more famous biography from which the above quotation is taken. Boswell's Life of Johnson is opinionated, highly anecdotal, and peppered with memorable lines. Focusing largely on Boswell's own friendship and conversations with Johnson, it creates an intimate atmosphere.

Such intimacy appalled the Victorians. They were enthusiastic biographers, largely subscribing to the view of historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle that 'The history of the world is but the biography of great men'. But they favoured earnest chronicles of public works, standing well back from their subjects, which is partly why we find them such hard going today.

In the early 20th century, the Bloomsbury Group writer Lytton Strachey acidly dissected Victorian values in Eminent Victorians, a book of four slim essays on key Victorian figures. It created such a stir that there were calls for the author to be questioned in Parliament. Strachey went on to trample genteel sensibilities again with Queen Victoria, a biography that drew on the techniques of melodrama and romantic fiction, and with Elizabeth and Essex, a highly speculative account of the relationship between Elizabeth I and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex.

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