Wolfgang Hildesheimer, the author of a cantankerous but illuminating biography of Mozart published in 1977, contends that spoken dialogue invariably knocks an opera off kilter.

All facts and little penetrating analyses do not an illuminating biography make.

The celebrations of Paul Robeson continue tonight on "American Masters," an illuminating if worshipful two-hour biography of a once contentious figure in process of rediscovery.

Ms. Buford's illuminating biography is an almost complete portrait, "almost complete," because Lancaster was, from all testimony, a man who withheld himself emotionally.

In his illuminating biography, Blake (1995), Peter Akroyd points out that "there may even have been copies of the combined volumes in which Experience preceded Innocence".

A graceful and illuminating biography of a writer whose ever-increasing stature invites frequent reconsideration; particularly good on Woolf's use of reading and her madness.

Ms. Whitney concludes her otherwise illuminating biography with the purported spiritual experiences of Robert Stone, Germaine Greer, the cabaret singer Andrea Marcovicci and others.

As the names came, so too did progressively illuminating biographies.

Gorky's tragic end echoed a beginning so horrific that, as Matthew Spender argues in his alternatingly illuminating and tedious biography of the artist, it could ultimately neither be faced nor shared.

An illuminating biography of a pivotal Justice of the Supreme Court whose instinctive conservatism was always tempered by his respect for the rule of law and his willingness to listen hard.