On People in Books by Hilaire Belloc — Read

It is a matter for the curious to examine (but not the wisest will determine it) why people in books are so extraordinarily different from real people. You might imagine that the people in biographies at least would be more or less like human beings -- but they never are. A man may say that the reason of this is that biography to-day is always a sort of modern, pale, conventional, and hypocritical affair -- that the biographer dare not print nine-tenths of his material under our modern tyranny of suppression, and that he has necessarily to make a puppet of his man. But there are others besides modern biographies, and it is true of them all that the people inside are not human. You have biographies of politicians acting upon principle; biographies of men who have accumulated vast fortunes without a hint of their main passion; biographies of men of lineage in which you are given to understand that their distinction was due to some individual worth and force.

Biographies of the frankest and most brutal periods, biographies of men long dead, biographies written by enemies, all have this in common, that the person inside the book does not go on like a human being.