Drowning in a sea of salacious biographies

Winston Churchill would have been delighted to have been elected as the BBC's "Greatest Briton". Born in Victorian times, formed by British Empire tales of derring-do, he believed absolutely in the 19th century view of "great men".

The person who would have been appalled would have been Lytton Strachey, who might well have hoped he'd destroyed the concept of great men of history for ever with his Eminent Victorians. In it he tore into the great figures of Victorianism, including Florence Nightingale and General Gordon, revealing all the hypocrisy, moral torpitude and deceit that was the reality behind the public face.

Yet here we are more than 80 years after the publication of that seminal work positively drowning in a sea of biographies, television bio-documentaries and contemporary lives. Queen Mary, London, has even announced a special centre devoted to teaching how to research a biography.

So nothing is going to stop the stream of works, good and bad, that have made this country the world centre of seeing history through personal lives. I even heard a German politician recently explain wistfully that public figures in his country had to spend so much time blowing their own trumpet "because we don't have your tradition of biographers to do it for us".

That could be regarded as something of a mixed blessing to anyone who has tried to wade through the piles of remaindered contemporary political biographies and ghosted sporting lives to try and find a copy of a straightforward history book with new ideas and illuminating analysis, such as Linda Colley's Captives.

Of course, it could be said – and is said by the perpetrators of the BBC's latest foray into the world of voted lists – that at least it gets younger people to know of figures such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Oliver Cromwell and Isaac Newton. Biography of people – and of matter (Oxygen and Einstein's Equation are just two of the latest examples) – has become the way of satisfying the new-found public interest in popular science.

Fine. But why do the British feel that this is the one true way of getting public interest in history or the arts? It's partly Strachey's fault. The reasons why he thought we should be wary of the admiration of great men and women – the frailty and hypocrisy of the personal lives that lay behind – are the very reasons why we love it.

There is nothing more exciting than knowing that Napoleon liked his mistresses to wait for him naked in the ante-room and then took only five minutes to enjoy them, that Dickens kept two households and that Lloyd George was reputed to have liked to make love on the Cabinet table.

Forget whether Napoleon was a monster or a master of Europe or both, or whether Lloyd George undermined the war effort or saved it in his quarrels with the generals. Old-fashioned scandal is the stuff that can sell a book, get real money for the newspaper extracts and then, if you're lucky, lead to a mini-TV series. For a nation so deeply distrustful of the abstract and the analytical, human lives and relationships are the concrete road to understanding. In history and literature, just as in public life and the media, the personal is the political.

This personalisation, or feminisation, of history leads down some strange paths. At its best it has rescued from obscurity some independent and important figures such as Rosalind Franklin and Rosamund Lehmann (to name the subjects of a couple of new biographies), brought attention to the contribution of wives of great men (Mrs Elliot and Mrs Darwin ) and, most ambitiously, attempted to evaluate partnerships in the joint lives of such couples as Sir Richard Burton and his wife, the Lutyenses and the Carlyles.

At its worst, it has led to a curious return to 19th-century moral judgement. Dickens? Bad, for betraying his wife. But Lady Hamilton? Good for being an independent spirit. Louis XVI, bad for being weak and a King. Marie Antoinette, OK for being weak but a victim. Anthony Burgess, a rotter for being a bully and lying about his history, the Prince Regent for being a cad and a bigamist, TE Lawrence for being a fantasist.

One by one, the figures of the past are brought up before the tribunal of today's biographers to be lectured for their mistresses, their deceits and their cruelty to wives and children. Like the tabloids peeking behind the servants' curtains in the royal palace, biographers have wallowed their way through the dirty linen of the past.

But how far does it help to understand Asquith to know that he fiddled with young girls under the travelling rug of his car or that Gladstone invited prostitutes back, not to convert them but for them to beat him. And even if it did help, once we enter the bedroom of the past, how can we possibly judge what was done, let alone why?

Fiona MacCarthy has made much of Byron's homosexuality in her new biography. But at no point does she seem to understand – and perhaps none of us can – the nature of bisexuality or the experience of the public school in regency England. "Ah," exclaimed Jeremy Clarkson in his film on Brunel in the Great Britons series, "we know what Brunel was thinking at this time. It was sex!" He then read out an extract from Brunel's diaries discussing the conversation, personality and companionship of several young ladies that made it clear that what he was looking for was a wife not a lay. Perhaps we no longer understand the difference, or simply don't believe there is one.

For this reason, perhaps, biography has until recently concentrated largely on writers. As their subjects wrote so much about their inner feelings, the biographer could be forgiven, and even find some evidence, for speculation about their private lives. It doesn't work for Jane Austen, still less for William Shakespeare. But you can just about manage with DH Lawrence or Sylvia Plath.

It is when biography would claim to be of equal stature with history as a discipline that the trouble starts. The prism of today's cult of celebrity is a poor means of evaluating the past. The chasm of time is simply too great to make the leap of imaginative understanding and still keep within the disciplines of fact. Claire Tomalin has written an immense biography of Pepys in which she never seems to grasp that men like Pepys or Boswell (or women) play with roles and self-mockery when writing a diary. When her subject ceases to write his diary and has lost his wife, she treats him simply as a clothes peg on which to write a description of the time, pointilliste landscape masquerading as portraiture. For her, as for her age, an "homme d'affaires" is only graspable in that they have them.

It is with a sinking feeling that one picks up John Grigg's fourth, and posthumous, volume of the life of Lloyd George, not for dread of its scholarship but in the knowledge that this will be one of the last great biographies to attempt to understand a politician in his own terms, to judge him by the choices he made and the policies he pursued.

We appreciate Winston Churchill now because he was a master of image, his voice and look preserved on the screen. Of his decisions to drive on with the disastrous landings at Gallipoli, his breaking of the miners' strike in 1910 and his persistent imperialism towards India and other "possessions", we know not and care not, if Sunday's award is anything to go by.

History is a hard trade. You have to find out what happened and why. Biography is simply part of our desire to colonise the past with the obsessions of our present.

a.hamilton@independent.co.uk