Biography seems relatively easy to produce, but difficult to write well. It is therefore treated with a certain amount of suspicion by academics. Historians tend to regard it as chatty, not primarily concerned with policy or the identification of social factors; literary people are more sympathetic, but, in order to blot out the prosy or the fact-laden, tend to revert to a default position. Biography for them is basically about writers, and best written by literary academics.

This leads to some anomalies. Jenny Hocking’s biography of Gough Whitlam (2008) is more fully achieved than her biography of Frank Hardy (2005), yet, as a political biography, would probably be disregarded, or merged with various quickies. Again, literary techniques may not in themselves be sufficient to illuminate a life, whatever they reveal about the inner one – as Brian Matthews demonstrates in parts of his recent biography of Manning Clark (2008).