Just how is one to write the biography of the sculptor Henry Moore? His wasn’t the sort of life likely to contain episodes of outrageous or scandalous conduct. On the contrary, he was thoroughly bourgeois, and not at all given to épatant gestures or escapades of any kind. Moreover, his life has long been an open book, its major episodes known and well documented in the many monographs that appeared regularly during his lifetime. Indeed, so unsensational, so “ordinary” was Moore’s life—he died in 1986 at the age of eighty-eight—that the only question it ever prompted was how this quintessentially English figure could produce sculpted figures and forms of such psychologically resonant character. Where did these images come from?

In the new Life of Henry Moore, Roger Berthoud—deputy editor of The Illustrated London Newsand the author of an earlier biography of the British painter Graham Sutherland—adopts about the only approach left to a Moore biographer. He aims to fill out the existing, received picture of Moore with as much fresh documentary material as possible, while at the same time doing all he can to get past the hagiographic public image to the “real” Moore. To this end he has been greatly aided by his timing. Nearly everyone who ever knew Moore was still alive when Berthoud began researching his book in the early Eighties, so he had access to the correspondence and reminiscences of principals who have since departed the scene. (Moore himself died before the