Yes, the life of the writer helps us understand what they have written, and why.

Not entirely true that wee ditty about Dostoevsky – but, for the avoidance of doubt, I've never read a Dostoevsky novel twice, and there are several I haven't read at all  I have, however, read more than one biography of Dostoevsky which explored the world of the novels. Often enough I've enjoyed a literary biography about someone as much as anything they may have written.

Currently I'm reading Anne Thwaite's biography of Philip Henry Gosse. I remember reading his son Edmund Gosse's memoir, 'Father and Son.' Thwaite's biography is a firm corrective to Edmund's distorted portrayal of his father Henry, the subject of Thwaite's book. Well researched biography is one of the more enjoyable ways of understanding historical context and what it is that makes a writer write, why they think as they do, what life was like for them.

Diarmid McCulloch's biography of Thomas Cranmer is essential reading to understand the life and times, and the mind, of the man behind The Book of Common Prayer. Roger Lipsey opened up the visionary but pragmatic mind, and the interrogative but persistently searching spirituality of Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary General of the United Nations and author of 'Markings'. Bruce Gordon's biography of John Calvin puts paid to the wide of the mark caricatures of the Geneva reformer and presents a far more accurate portrait of Calvin's achievements and ongoing significance as a major constructive thinker and influential presence in western thought.

Denise Levertov, was a poet of protest and prayer and humane observation of human life, whose father was Jewish and became a Church of England priest, and who herself emigrated to America and later converted to the Catholic church. She has been the subject of three major biographies in recent years – together they help us understand her response to the Vietnam war, militarism and racism, environmental crisis and our capacity as a species for both cruelty and compassion. She is a good example of a poet best read with awareness of her life story. I read and learned from her for years before a good biography appeared. But until I read those biographies I had no idea of the personal impact of her American context of unrest about Vietnam, Civil Rights movements, and her own evolving political critique of late 20th Century western culture. Her conversion was slowly signalled in her later works before becoming quite explicit, though always with occasional and residual doubt about her own spiritual security.

Over a lifetime of preaching, countless thoughts and insights have percolated up from such reading. Not all theological reflection begins in theology books, and often enough our deepest insights into God, ourselves and the world around us, comes from those who know how to tell a good story, whether novel or biography. And for that matter, it is often the poet who enables us to see what otherwise we would miss, and to understand something of the mystery of who we are, or wish we were