Hoare had written biographies of Noel Coward and the aesthete Stephen Tennant before The Rings of Saturn, Sebald’s mesmerising tour through the myth and history of coastal East Anglia, struck him like a thunderbolt. In contrast, three titles on a science-heavy shortlist – Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder, Manjit Kumar’s Quantum and Liaquat Ahamed’s Lords of Finance – adhered to the now-favoured format of the group biography that weaves the linked stories of friends, rivals or colleagues. Whether tracing the model for Robinson Crusoe into the sea-mists of rumour, or deducing Shakespeare’s daily round from faint echoes in the archives, Diana Souhami and Charles Nicholl – quoted below – exemplify this hunt for a truth about the elusive past that burrows beyond the "facts". Four decades before what Lee calls James Boswell’s "garrulous hold-all" of a Life in 1791 made Dr Johnson the archetypal subject of biography, Johnson himself had written a vivid unofficial account of Richard Savage – the penniless wild poet and close friend of his youth.

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