Lives of others.(Shoot the Widow)(Book review)

At a time when instruments for recording and disseminating information about people's intimate behavior are cheap and easy to use, and when newspapers and magazines and television programs and Web sites purvey that kind of information without restraint, and when even ordinary people apparently can't do enough to tell the world everything about themselves, a defense of the professional biographer's right to pry does not seem something that civilization stands in dire need of. Just in case, though, two such defenses have recently been published.

Meryle Secrest is a biographer who has nine lives so far, all of figures in the arts, including Kenneth Clark, Leonard ...