This chapter explores Hitler’s role in the Nazi Party, with a particular focus on Hitler’s relationship to antisemitism. It carefully examines the evidence concerning Hitler’s views towards Jews, and argues forcefully for the emergence in the 1920s of a vision that was already at least implicitly genocidal and certainly murderous. It thus makes a forceful case both for continuity in Hitler’s ideas leading to the Holocaust, and for the primacy of his vision in determining the later policy towards Jews adopted by the Nazi regime.

The first half of the twentieth century saw a veritable industry spring up around Pepys. Three best-selling biographies by Arthur Bryant were influential in establishing Pepys as an English hero, while novels about Pepys’s wife Elizabeth mocked attitudes towards the diary advocated in mainstream historical works. Spurring much of this interest, however, was the experience of two world wars. To trace the roles the diary performed during wartime this chapter looks at three very different productions: the long-running diary parody by R. M. Freeman (1909–46); the war diaries of one of Pepys’s readers, Constance Miles (1939–43); and the post-war BBC drama The Diary of Samuel Pepys (1958). In wartime, Pepys’s portrayal as an ‘ordinary’ Englishman proved more effective than his representation as a heroic figure. The journal and its adaptations legitimated a range of emotional responses to disturbing times.

Percy Shelley once joked, ‘self, that burr that will stick to one. I can’t get it off yet’. But a burr, if annoying, often carries seeds. That ‘self’ abided with those he left behind. The crop of major biographies and memoirs of Shelley written during the period 1823–78 came from those who knew him. While their portraits are often consistent in details, each offers a different facet of a chameleonic figure. This chapter surveys some of the Shelleys from which one might choose.

The story of Shelley’s life is inextricably linked with the stories of the women who influenced his work, and of the children for whom he was responsible. This chapter explores the ways in which this superficially least domestic of men produced a body of work shaped in fundamental ways by his relationships with the women and children in his family, as well as by those with a small number of other women who existed beyond its boundaries. It traces Shelley’s relationships with Harriet Westbrook, Elizabeth Hitchener, Mary Godwin, Claire Clairmont, Teresa Viviani, and Jane Williams in and out of his biography and his poetry, arguing that although neither these women nor the children in their care could always live up to Shelley’s vision of ideal, uncircumscribed companionship, they were no less important to either his life or his art because of their complicated, flesh-and-blood reality.

This chapter discusses the relationship between Shelley and one of his closest friends: Thomas Love Peacock. It sketches the origins and development of that friendship and suggests some reasons for its significance. Particular attention is paid to the very different casts of mind of the two men, something that is especially evident in Peacock’s criticism of what he regarded as Shelley’s culpable neglect of reality, in both his life and his art. Such criticism has its most enduring literary manifestation in Peacock’s caricature of Shelley as Scythrop Glowry in Nightmare Abbey – a novel by which Shelley, to his credit, was delighted. The chapter concludes with an account of Peacock’s peculiarly reticent Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley, in which he sought to defend the biographical dignity of the poet against a malicious and frequently error-prone ‘tribunal of public opinion’.

As the most ‘delightful’ and ‘useful’ of genres, biography occupied a high place in Johnson’s ranking of literary genres, and he wrote many kinds of biography. All were aimed at raising the audience’s moral aspirations, showing them what was humanly possible. By the same token, sentimental panegyrics were no use, because they were too unrealistic to help the reader; they might also be based on falsehood, and Johnson is consistently sceptical towards stories that sound too good to be true. In his early biographies, Johnson explicitly draws conclusions about virtue and vice – even condemning his late friend Richard Savage, who despite his many admirable qualities set a dangerous example of contravening ordinary ethical standards. Yet by the time Johnson wrote the Lives of the Poets more than three decades later, he approached these questions more subtly, speculating on the connection between bad morals and bad writing, and delivering his lessons with restrained irony.

The Johnson legend owes most to James Boswell, yet despite writing the classic biography Boswell only knew Johnson in the last twenty-one years of his life, and less well than other biographers. There were also several short biographies, part of a vast literature on Johnson which was already sizeable in his lifetime. Much of it was hostile: he was caricatured as inhuman, dictatorial, and aggressive. Boswell, notwithstanding the brilliance of his account, was partly to blame for cementing this idea: he privileged Johnson as a debater over the other sides of a very complicated personality, and sometimes turned Johnson’s conversations into monologues. The Romantics, who despised Johnson’s literary principles, amplified this caricature, and the nineteenth century was in general a low point of Johnson’s critical reputation. Yet his books were widely read in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth he won many admirers among both scholars and authors.

As well as providing a brief biography of Sophie de Grouchy, the introduction sets out the aims of the book. It describes how A Republic of Sympathy is the tale of how thought could be produced by an eighteenth-century woman in a time of Revolution: with all the possibilities, limitations, and opportunities that this period offered. It outlines how over this period, Grouchy developed her own, unique form of republicanism, by appealing to sympathy as the glue between the individual and the republic. It emphasises that Grouchy’s thought consisted of a series of shifting, adapting ideas, which nevertheless consistently relied on this sentiment. It describes how Grouchy not only experiment with variations of her theory over this period, but with different mediums of expressing her ideas: including pedagogical treatise, journal articles, translated texts, commentaries, collaborative projects, or embodied in her lived relationships. It also highlights Grouchy’s key interlocutors: from Adam Smith, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from her husband, the marquis de Condorcet to Benjamin Constant, from Thomas Paine to Jacques Pierre Brissot.

Martial Poirson foregrounds France’s greatest writer of comedy and the most widely read, performed and translated French-language playwright in the world, Molière. Highlighting the myths that have thrived around this national treasure, Poirson notes that almost nothing is known about the biography and history of this national treasure. Inseparable from the nation’s narration of itself and of its status at the centre of colonial empire, Molière has been celebrated for his supposedly republican values, and his language – ‘la langue de Molière’ – has become foundational in France and exported, sometimes aggressively, across la francophonie, or the French-speaking world. Notably, Poirson provides insights into how Molière’s language and oeuvre fared in colonized Indochina. With astonishing constancy and unparalleled resilience, Molière has persisted in the French and international cultural subconscious for over four centuries.

This introduction offers a brief account of Clare’s biography, drawing attention to some of the major events in his life, and some of the aspects of his life and his work which have most interested critics. It goes on to offer an extended close reading of one of Clare’s poems, in order to demonstrate the ways in which Clare is able to write within convention, but also to develop a unique poetic voice. By examining his engagement with the aesthetic discourse of the picturesque as exemplary, it argues for his particular capacity both to reflect and to enable reflection upon Romantic-period issues and debates, and also for the originality of Clare’s posture and verse.

This chapter provides a brief and accessible account, not just of Goldsmith’s life and literary career, but also of the ways in which he was perceived by his contemporaries, often as intellectually lightweight and somewhat foolish. That perception is questioned here, as is the traditional biographical presentation of Goldsmith as long-suffering and put upon. He is presented here rather as a survivor and a literary success. The tradition of biographical writing is also briefly sketched.

‘Critical Reception before 1900’ presents the early history of Goldsmith’s critical reception and surveys concerns which recur in critical treatments. Two themes in particular recur. The first is that of an elegant versatility that fails to sustain its genius. A second critical theme sees apparently autobiographical episodes in Goldsmith’s works flow in to fill the gaps in his biography. Anecdotes of his character proliferated after his death in 1774, and 200 years later G. S. Rousseau would declare Goldsmith’s life to be the major obstacle to in-depth criticism of his writings. From the early nineteenth century a fondly sentimentalized authorial figure dominated responses to Goldsmith’s fiction and to the landscapes of his major poems. Some critics did consider the sociopolitical and moral arguments of Goldsmith’s works: his critiques of luxury and his comparative surveys of human happiness remained active in his familiar appeal to Victorian readers.

‘Critical reception after 1900’ surveys latter-day critical responses to Goldsmith’s works, in which the vocabulary of ineffable genius and a tendency to biographical criticism have given way to newer emphases on irony and sincerity, poetics of place and space, intellectual history and Enlightenment, and Irish cultural and political history.