Craig Brown on the art of biography.

[T]he artificiality of the genre is helped neither by the slippery nature of memory, nor, indeed, by the slippery nature of biographers. Everyone who has ever written non-fiction will know that, from paragraph to paragraph, perhaps even from sentence to sentence, one is always obliged to pick a version of the truth: every available source has a slightly different tale to tell. It would be tedious to present each different version of each event, or the finished book would be impossibly long, and impossibly boring. So which to choose? And how do you know if it is the right one?

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