Monthly column on the arts: I was there

I don't know whether you browse much in charity shops. It's one of my favourite pastimes; as an inveterate collector of other people's past enthusiasms I enjoy entering with a few coins in my pocket and emerging with carrier bags stuffed with treasure trove.

Our house is spatially challenged, so much of the stuff has to go back after it has been listened to, read or played with, but the coins go to worthy causes.

What really happened?

Lately I've been browsing, courtesy of Help the Aged, through Margaret Thatcher's The Downing Street Years. (Having recently picked up biographies of Harolds MacMillan and Wilson, I'm on a bit of a nostalgic binge.) I lived through these events. I saw her cry on TV. Now I can read her side of the story.
I love the inside story, the opportunity to see for myself what went on behind closed doors - it's why I like TV programmes about airports. I want to know what happens away from public gaze. In the case of airline staff and prime ministers, I've got quite a stake in how well or badly they do their job.

I love too that 'how-to' view of events and achievements that biographies provide. It's fascinating to see how politicians came to power and wealthy people managed to accumulate so much. A good biography, like that of Jimmy Swaggart I reviewed last month, is a painstaking jigsaw carefully assembling from small details a picture that only a good biographer can see properly in the first place.

Self-examination

And biographies allow you to review your own life and your own history. Even if the person lived and died before you did, it's valuable to watch somebody else handling crises and rites of passage one has also experienced. A good biography can aid self-examination. I rarely finish a good biography without understanding myself better in some way. Maybe Socrates had a point when he remarked that the unexamined life is not worth living.

Used by God

Christian biographies are no exception, which is why the decline in Christian reading is so sad. We grow, in part, by reading how others grew. Hero-worship need not enter into it. 'Imitate me,' Paul advised - not because he was wonderful, but because he had a wonderful Saviour (Philippians 3.12-4.1).

George Burton worked at London's Mayflower Centre many years ago. David and Jean Hewitt's generous and unsparing biography shows a man who was enormously used by God and must have been one of the most difficult, exasperating colleagues imaginable. It's one of the finest biographies I know.

I feel the lack of that compassionate truthfulness somewhat in Margaret Thatcher's autobiography, but John Wesley in his published Journal also has a tendency to edit his life to maximise its edification potential. We know he did because we now have his private journals. For my money, the private journals show the better picture. Wesley underestimated the value of his own mistakes and overestimated the value of his didactic moments. You need both to understand the man and how God used him, which is not to deny the immense ministry of the published version.

Some Christian biographies score through apparent naivety. Jimmy Carter's Keeping Faith often shows him as a less than perfect statesman: only a diarist with no thought of enhancing his historical reputation would have left the story unchanged. There is no guile in Carter's book. It remains, if not a record of the greatest president, then certainly a brilliant example of how Christians might ideally be expected to think and behave if entrusted with the most powerful job in the world.

Helpful

Apparent naivety of a different sort is to be found in Michael Saward's A Faint Streak of Humility, which relives old battles and reopens old wounds. Not every reviewer has felt that Saward has kept the vitriol adequately corked. But I found the early part of the book extraordinarily moving. In describing how he became a Christian (including a superb discussion of Christian youth camps) Saward challenged at least one reader to review his own teenage and twenties years and reflect on his own mistakes. I am sure that Saward did not see this as a major aim of his book: he probably saw that section as a curtain raiser to the more tempestuous times that were to follow. For me, it was a moving and helpful education in how a young man grows in Christian faith and commitment.

That's the charm of biographies. The benefits are so often accidental. A bad one is an exercise in self-promotion, a good one changes your own life for the better, and usually in ways that would surprise the author. If you haunt the charity shops, it's not a costly exercise.

Two pleas in closing.

One, buy your Christian biographies new. Christian book-selling needs your support.

Two, please don't shop in my local charity shops - at least, not until I've had first go at the good stuff.