Biographies these days seem to resemble dumbbells, made as much for physical exercise as for spiritual or intellectual enlightenment; they could also serve as doorstops or defensive weapons against intruders as you try to read them in bed (this requires constant wrestling, even without the intruders). Modern biographers appear to think that facts are like men, created equal, and that none should be left out. I understand the temptation to leave no fact unprinted, for when one has found a fact in the archives it seems a waste of effort if it is not imparted to somebody else. We, however, should always remember what Voltaire said: that the best way to be a bore is to say everything.

There are a few individuals in history, of course, about whom we should like to know everything, down to their breakfasting habits. Chief among these, I suppose, is Adolf Hitler. We feel, unreasonably of course, that if only we knew about his breakfast oats we should be able to pluck out the heart of his evil. Otherwise, brevity is the soul of wit and perhaps even of merit.

Is Bertolt Brecht one of those few of whom we should wish to know everything? I confess that as I read this giant biography—600 pages, so closely printed that each of them is equal to one and a half normal pages—I thought of Macaulay’s review of Edward Nares’s Memoirs of the Life and Administration of the Right Honourable William