According to a reviewer of a new life of Machiavelli, there was a time when any such biography with the title Niccolo's Smile "would have seemed as improbable as, say, Stalin's Wit, or The Charm of Genghis Khan: the genially risible was not Machiavelli's thing."
This is a bit unfair. Stalin had his "bad side", of course, but he was known to loosen up considerably in company after a few glasses of vodka and was a great man for the one-liner. "Prison!" he would shout good-humouredly at someone who had inadvertently offended him, and the fellow would be hauled off to a dungeon for the rest of his life, much to the amusement of the party. "Shoot him - now" was another punch-line which never failed to raise a laugh. In truth, there was nothing Joe Stalin appreciated more than the witty remark or the punch-line to a good story, preferably of course if it involved the extermination of enemies or the foolishness of democracy, but as a contemporary of his (Gregory Yurk) fondly observed, "sure that was his way".
As for Genghis Khan, he too could turn on the charm whenever he wanted. Though known to have a bit of a temper, "Geng", as he was known to his intimates, would often take a few minutes off from overrunning Central Asia for some private time with his pals, reverting to his beloved childhood games of hide-and-seek-and-exterminate, pin the dagger in the donkey's heart, bugger-my-neighbour and the like.
Why, you might as well mock those biographers who gave us Laugh Along with Sam Beckett; PG Wodehouse - Secret Friend to Dr Crippen; and Seamus Heaney: To Hell with Digging.
Of course this whole business of expose biographies has got entirely out of hand. I am not entirely guilt-free in this area myself, I have to confess, having recently published my rather revealing biography of the little-known Edwardian doctor who specialised in odd skin eruptions - Dr Edward Castlethorpe: Warts and All. Meanwhile Britain's New Dictionary of National Biography is scheduled for publication by the Oxford University Press in 2004. This is a revised edition of the "old" DNB, which covered the lives of 50,000 prominent (if mostly forgotten) people, and it will add details of personalities who have died in the past 10 years.
Nigel Nicolson, one of the contributors to the new volume, has pointed out a major change in approach to that taken by the DNB's first editor, Sir Leslie Stephen. All "critical disposition" and "picturesque description" was forbidden by Stephen, so that readers came to know only the "positive" sides of the various personalities: they did not hear about sexual pecadillos or about criminal activities. Supplementary volumes were gradually more honest, and in the new edition, edited by Prof Brian Harrison, what is required is full disclosure - warts and all.
On the face of it, this seems honest and sensible, an open approach to be welcomed. But we hardly need positivists or relativists or George Steiner or Jacques Derrida or anyone else to remind us that supposedly bare presentation by numerous contributors of "the facts", even in 800-word biographical entries, may not actually deliver the truth about the men and women in question. (It may not even deliver the facts).
Nigel Nicolson reminded us that the spy Guy Burgess was excluded from the first DNB because of his treachery, and Randolph Churchill because of his drink problem (couldn't get enough). With the new approach, it might prove interesting to consider who has been excluded this time around, and why. Did a certain individual fail to sink to the approved level of national betrayal necessary to ensure a mention? Could an excluded politician have crept in to the DNB if only he had consumed an extra bottle of wine daily? One wishes the project well, but so-called dictionaries of national biography, Who's Who guides and the like are really rather tiresome things. This will not be true of the biography bible which I am currently editing. The Dictionary of National Nonentity will chronicle the non-doings of all those who have made this country what it isn't, or more accurately, of those who can justifiably and proudly claim not to have contributed to what this country now is. Everybody who is nobody will be there; it will be a paean to the outsider, and the great joy of it is that those who make it into the volume can feel in no way superior to those left outside.