Lives examined: the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography

The praise lavished last month by John Torode here on the first volume of   Fredrik Logevall ’ s  biography of John Fitzgerald Kennedy was richly deserved and well placed. So was Torode ’ s sniper-shot at too many other historical biographies — “massive tomes often written by serious historians who should have known better”. Logevall ’ s book is extremely long, but doesn ’ t read that way; it is gripping, insightful, and surprising. The biography stems from an enormous and wide-ranging groundwork of research worn lightly, and is written in a way that appeals to a general reader as well as an expert. These are exactly the reasons why it won this year ’ s Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography (ELHB), which I chair.

The short-listed competition was formidable: Sudhir Hazareesingh ’ s Black Spartacus: the epic life of Toussaint L ’ Ouverture ; Sarah LeFanu ’ s Something of Themselves: Kipling, Kingsley, Conan Doyle and the Anglo-Boer War; and Samanth Subramanian ’ s A Dominant Character: the radical science and restless politics of JBS Haldane. Announcing the list, the judges remarked: “ Each of these books links the character and destiny of exceptional people to the temper of their times, vividly demonstrating why historical biography remains so relevant to the general reader as well as to the specialist.”

This bears out the approach adhered to by the ELHB in the nearly twenty years that it has been running. The Prize ’ s definition of a “historical” figure is catholic but careful: someone who made an impact on the world, often though not always in the sphere of public affairs. Writers and artists come in for a certain amount of consideration, but generally must have played a public role. The LeFanu book, whose inclusion was a matter of lively debate among the judges, is a good example. Subjects of winning books have not only been obvious public figures, though some have: Philip Ziegler ’ s Edward Heath (2011), Anne Somerset ’ s Queen Anne (2013), Charles Moore ’ s Margaret Thatcher, volume 1 (2014), Giles Tremlett ’ s Isabella of Castile (2018). Others are less obviously famous but are shown, through a pioneering biography, to have lived lives of unexpected significance: Andrew Gailey ’ s The Lost Imperialist: Lord Dufferin, myth-making and memory in an age of celebrity (2016); Tristram Hunt ’ s The Frock-Coated Communist: the revolutionary life of Friedrich Engels (2010); Katie Whitaker ’ s Mad Madge: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Royalist, Writer and Romantic (2004). Winning volumes have also recorded more marginal figures whose lives impacted upon history, sometimes unexpectedly: Frances Wilson ’ s How to Survive the Titanic, or The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay (2012), Ben Macintyre ’ s A Spy Among Friends : Kim Philby and the great betrayal (2015), Rosemary Hill, God ’ s Architect: Pugin and the building of romantic Britain (2008). I hope it is not too self-regarding of us to include professional historians in this light: last year ’ s winner was David Hayton ’ s Conservative Revolutionary: the lives of Lewis Namier , while lives of Hugh Trevor-Roper and Eric Hobsbawm have also been shortlisted.

It is apposite that biography played a key part in Namier ’ s powerfully idiosyncratic approach to history, but as a discipline it has not always been kindly looked upon by the historical profession. From the mid-twentieth century, the impact of the Annales school in France, together with the popularity of anthropological and sociological approaches, left biography at something of a discount; the pages of  the distinguished journal Past and Present, which influentially advanced the new structuralist approaches to historical analysis, rarely allowed for biographical studies. A similar development was taking place in literary criticism, where the idea that consideration of a writer ’ s life  might illuminate their work tended to be sneered at as a belles-lettriste delusion.

Over the last two decades or so, these reductive attitudes have been comprehensively rejected, and the study of “Life Writing” now occupies a respected place in academe, notably through the Centre for the Study of Life-Writing founded at Wolfson College, Oxford, by the distinguished biographer Hermione Lee. In recent historiography, key European subjects such as the Third Reich have been illuminated through biographical studies by Robert Gerwarth , Stephan Malinowski and Ian Kershaw, winner of the 2005 ELHB for Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry and Britain ’ s road to war. Similarly Julian Jackson ’ s monumental A Certain Idea of France: the life of Charles de Gaulle, which won the Longford Prize in 2020, is widely acclaimed as a major contribution to the cultural and political history of twentieth-century France.

Anglophone historiography has traditionally been more hospitable than its Continental equivalent to the idea of historical biography, and so has the general reading public. Elizabeth Longford was a major figure in keeping this tradition going, an achievement continued with considerable r é clame by her daughter Antonia Fraser and granddaughters Rebecca and Flora Fraser. It was thus apposite that in 2002, the year of her grandmother ’ s death, Flora Fraser and Peter Soros founded the Historical Biography Prize in her memory. There could be no more appropriate memorial, and the connecting thread joining the varied roster of winners over the years is that they have been both intellectually distinguished and accessibly written.

Elizabeth Longford ’ s studies of Wellington, Queen Victoria, Wilfred Scawen Blunt and others were marked by a rare kind of empathy with her subjects, a penetrating psychological insight, a sense of how private and public lives intersect, and an appealing and sometimes astringent humour. Her work was also based on hard graft in original sources. The judges look for a similar balance of qualities. More than once, an ostensibly strong candidate has fallen out of the field because its footnotes revealed a reliance mainly on secondary authorities; while several magisterial studies based on a heavy manuscript trawl have fallen by the wayside because the portrait they draw of their subject remained somehow unconvincing or inert.

Chairing this Prize is obviously an honour, but it is also immensely stimulating and entertaining. This is in large part due, not only to the works considered, but  to the nature of the judges. Distinguished historical biographers all, they have included David Gilmour (winner of the first Prize in 2003 for The Long Recessional: the imperial life of Rudyard Kipling), Andrew Roberts, Munro Price and A.N. Wilson; the current line-up is Antonia Fraser, Flora Fraser, Richard Davenport-Hines, Rana Mitter and myself.

Judges’ meetings (even by Zoom) are lively and opinionated, sometimes tending to unexpected inclusions and exclusions. Despite being arrived at on hotly-argued grounds, the eventual outcomes reflect an impressive unanimity. Flora Fraser, as Chair and co-founder of the Prize, believes profoundly in concentrating the judicial mind by the prospect of a slap-up lunch after every meeting, and hosts a lavish dinner for the winner every year, which ends with a round-table seminar, discussing the book with its author. I don ’ t think I am the only person to come away feeling that I have learned something new about the discipline of historical biography, a genre of evolving importance which this Prize can modestly claim to play a part in redefining.

The Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, worth £5,000, is awarded annually. Further details can be found on the website .

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