Tom Stoppard: A Life
HERMIONE LEE
(FABER & FABER, 992 PP, £30)
Tablet bookshop price £27 • Tel 020 7799 4064

As a great admirer of both Sir Tom Stoppard and Dame Hermione Lee (full disclosure: I lent her my Stoppard interview transcripts and archives), my advance concern for this book was not just the difficulty of writing a life still being lived (the first time Lee has done this), but that Stoppard, a famously charming man who considers himself to have had “a charmed” existence, would offer little purchase for biography.

Yet, though Lee has not discovered that the plays are really written by a factory of child orphans on slave wages, she does find something so far unrevealed behind the warm, kind, public profile of Britain’s most celebrated dramatist. The book contains many stories of the writer’s steeliness with, even rudeness to, collaborators. Actors and directors are punchily put down during rehearsals; when Stoppard scripts a film of John le Carré’s The Russia House, a mild suggestion from the novelist for improvement receives a warning not to tell Stoppard how to write screenplays.

And, although Stoppard is an attentive father and grandfather who throws famously generous parties for friends (Lee reveals that a recent one cost well over £100,000), he brings a striking isolation, almost iciness, to his work. Wives and lovers must learn that he needs completely free space to write a play. When a relationship with the actress Felicity Kendal ends amicably, Stoppard confides, in a letter to a friend, that he is hoping “to reach a stage where no women or children” are dependent on him. That hasn’t happened – he’s now happily married to Sabrina Guinness – but the driven loner is an aspect of Stoppard’s personality that surely few readers will expect to find.