This book makes "a first-rate joint biography of this fascinating couple," John Simon said in these pages last year.

The notion that a first-rate biography can be less than 500 pages long has all but vanished from our collective literary consciousness.

She is a great Joycean, and the author of a first-rate biography of her famous compatriot and fellow exile.

Cate's empathy and sympathy for his subject make this a first-rate biography.

The one puzzle in John Lewis Gaddis's first-rate biography of the diplomat George Kennan is the subtitle.

Taken together, the letters and the sundry additions constitute a first-rate joint biography of this fascinating couple.

Virginia Woolf (who went so far as to declare the biographer "equal" to the subject) produced a first-rate biography of the Bloomsbury painter Roger Fry.

Why is this detail, the essence of first-rate biography, a problem?

If ever a jazz musician deserved a first-rate biography, it was Lester Young.

A first-rate biography might have reminded the art world of his unique eloquence.