Biographies and bias

I just finished reading, without getting a hernia I might add, Jairam Ramesh’s hefty biography of V K Krishna Menon ( A Chequered Life: The Many Lives of V K Krishna Menon ). It’s excellent. 

Over the years, as I have often boasted here, I have read many autobiographies of all sorts of people, famous and obscure. But few biographies. 

There is a reason for this: A biographer can never get it even half-right. I mean, the facts may well all be there. But the truth? Now that’s a different thing altogether. 

In autobiographies, some economy with the truth is natural. The writer