Happily, a tool is readily at hand: Christoph Wolff's magisterial new biography, "Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician."

In this, Mr. Karl's magisterial new biography triumphantly succeeds.

Deborah Jowitt's magisterial biography and critical study, "Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance" (Simon & Schuster), arrived two years ago.

Mukherjee's magisterial "biography" of the most dreaded of modern afflictions.

One lesson of David McCullough's magisterial biography of Truman is the degree to which contingency rules human events.

Hence, even though Samuel Flagg Bemis completed his magisterial two-volume biography over 40 years ago, it remains definitive, since Adams's political thinking doesn't require reinterpretation every generation.

The comparisons are apt, said Ron Chernow, author of "Titan," the magisterial biography of John D. Rockefeller.

The continuation of this magisterial biography recounts Goethe's middle years, which the author situates in the context of the French Revolution and Kantian philosophy.

Here is the second volume of John Richardson's magisterial - and masterly - biography of the minotaur of modernism: "A Life of Picasso."

"I am not a philosopher," Redé explained in his autobiography, which was edited by Hugo Vickers, a British writer known for his magisterial biography of the photographer Cecil Beaton.