On the Pleasures of Reading Biographies of People You Dislike
Robert Caro's The Power Broker, a 1,344-page biography of Robert Moses — the urban planner who reshaped New York City through highways, bridges, and parks while destroying neighbourhoods and displacing hundreds of thousands of residents — is riveting precisely because its subject is detestable. Caro does not soften Moses; he illuminates him, revealing the intelligence, energy, and ruthlessness that made him one of the most powerful unelected officials in American history. The book succeeds because dislike, when informed by understanding, becomes a richer and more useful emotion than either admiration or contempt.
The biography of a person you dislike provides something that sympathetic biography cannot: a genuine test of your capacity for empathy. Understanding why Moses believed highways were more important than neighbourhoods, or why Nixon valued power above legality, requires imaginative effort that comfortable agreement does not. This is not sympathy — it is comprehension, and comprehension of the disagreeable is a more valuable intellectual skill than comprehension of the congenial.
The genre offers practical lessons that admiring biography obscures. A biography of someone you admire confirms your existing values; a biography of someone you dislike challenges them. Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs, for readers who find Jobs's management style repugnant, provides a detailed case study in how interpersonal cruelty can coexist with genuine creative vision — a combination that comfortable moral frameworks prefer to deny.
The pleasure is partly aesthetic. Great biographical writing depends on dramatic tension, and dislike provides tension that admiration cannot. Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy derives much of its narrative energy from Thomas Cromwell's collision with Thomas More — a figure whom history has sanctified but whom Mantel portrays as dangerously rigid. The reader's sympathy for Cromwell, who is in many ways despicable, represents Mantel's finest achievement: she makes you root for someone you should not.
The New York Review of Books (https://www.nybooks.com) publishes the most consistently excellent biographical criticism in English, with reviews that evaluate biography as literary art rather than mere information delivery.
Choose a biography of a historical figure whose values or actions you find objectionable and read it with the same attention you would bring to a figure you admire. The exercise is not moral relativism — your judgement can remain intact. What changes is the quality of that judgement: it becomes informed rather than reflexive, grounded in evidence rather than assumption. That transformation, from dislike to informed dislike, is one of the most intellectually honest pleasures available.
