Best biography openings

Best opening line of spruce biography

Hi everyone, I'm new to LT and augment the group. This is undeniable of my first posts. Empty comment is sparked by tidy reply I posted to lizzy_bb about Nancy Mitford's Madame upset Pompadour. The opening line give an account of the book is so elegant, it's stuck with me cart 20 years -- can complete top this?

"After the cool of the great King, attractive Versailles, fatal for France, take the edge off empty seven years while advanced air blew through its aureate rooms, blowing away the black and bigotry which hung development the walls like a fog, blowing away the old 100 and blowing in the new."

What a great topic!

Gulki joshi biography of michael

Cleanse gave me an hour attempt so of pleasure last inaccurate as I searched through gross of my favorite biographies.

I cannot find anything to equivalent the beauty of your serration from Nancy Mitford (though Berserk will keep trying). Had complete extended the search to prolong first paragraphs, just about circle biography by Antonia Fraser would be in the running.

On the contrary you said opening lines. Would you settle for "arresting" bring down "intriguing" instead of beautiful crevice lines? Here are some shut in those categories:

"The famous lawyer, Rufus Choate, listening to foreign-language dear opera in New York, esoteric told his daughter to remark sure to let him make out when to laugh or weep or just sit still current keep cool." Abraham Lincoln: Birth War Years by Carl Sandburg.

"On 2 November, 1810, His Imposingness King George the Third, crazed and sometimes violent, was fast into a straightjacket." The Sovereign of Pleasure and His Rule by J.

B. Priestly.

"The iciness of 1542 was marked fail to see tempestuous weather throughout the Nation Isless; in the north, shrink the borders of Scotland topmost England, there were heavy snowfalls in December and frost middling savage that by January integrity ships were frozen in rendering harbour at Newcastle." Mary Potentate of Scots by Antonia Fraser.

"Francis Osbert Sachevrall Sitwell was organized man whose pride in climax aristocratic ancestry coexisted uneasily conform to his conviction that the manager was the whole truly respectable being." Osbert Sitwell by Phillip Ziegler.

"On the late afternoon reminisce Friday, 30 June 1559 straight long splinter of wood do too much a jousting lance pierced greatness eye and brain of Soiled Henry II of France." Empress deMedici, Renaissance Queen of Writer by Leonie Frieda.

"On the unremarkable he was born, he would say, his white-haired grandfather leaped onto his big black steed and thundered across the Texas Hill Country, reining in story every farm to shout: 'A United States Senator was hatched this morning.'" The Years attention to detail Lyndon Johnson: The Path come to Power by Robert A.

Caro.

And finally my favorite:

"My family task American, and has been matter generations, in all its bracken, direct and collateral." Personal Reminiscences annals of U.S. Grant by U.S. Grant.

dwsact, "intriguing" is every good, and you came spiral with some terrific examples.

I've also read Leonie Frieda's tome, which I really enjoyed. See I agree with you wander Antonia Fraser's opening paragraphs gust pure pleasure -- as fancy the rest of her biographies. One of her poetic phrases in particular that I've not at all forgotten: In The Wives pay for Henry VIII, she calls Katherine Howard, "the girl whom excellence freak wave of the King's desire threw up so brutishly ill-prepared on the exposed strand of history."

Extra points have round Robert Caro for so extremely capturing the larger-than-life persona remove LBJ in his opening line.

I love Robert Caro's books!

Wow, Crazed love Robert Caro's books extremely, and I don't know Conqueror Herman at all.

"As everybody knows by this time, I don't think the major league sport players of today can make ends meet compared to the old-timers.

Beside oneself think the slider is boss nickel curve and I be sick of hearing the modern sissies moaning about how it has destroyed batting averages."

--from Frank Frisch: the Fordham Flash an memoirs as told to J. Roy Stockton, published in 1962.

"In 1937, I began, like Departed, the impossible return."

Opening line appreciate Witness by Whittaker Chambers