One doesn't ordinarily expect a son to be a trustworthy recorder of his father's life: if he isn't paying off the old gentleman for remembered slights, like Shakespeare's Edmund, he'll be praising him for unremembered virtues, like Hamlet. So the first thing to be said about Sean Day-Lewis's biography of his father is that he is neither an Edmund nor a Hamlet. He has written a calm and generous book, free of either rancour or special pleading, a book that carries a convincing sense of objectivity.

LRB 22 May 1980 | PDF Download