What Robert Caro taught me about the individual
The claim of the biographer is that history is better illustrated and understood through the prism of the single important life. Given Carr’s point that only some facts are historical, this inevitably means that most biographical writing is the account of the lives of great men and women. In that debate, the Caro and the Carlyle kept ganging up on the Carr with the proposition that the individual life changes the world.