Ruth Brandon rails against biographers who are obsessed with telling us how many slices of toast their subject had for breakfast; she rants about academics who find a few unknown letters by a famous name and base a book on them.
She's scathing about our weakness for biographies that reveal everything about the famous and infamous - childhood, family, career, sex, scandal - except their ideas, which might bore us, we're so lazy. No wonder Brandon has such fierce views about biographies: she writes them herself. But rather than concentrate on a single life in great detail, she prefers groups, movements, big themes.
The Surrealists are the latest, that group of painters, writers and film-makers who, between the two world wars, invented their own brand of artistic chaos. Queer and quarrelsome, gifted and gauche, they fitted a magic lens into our spectacles which turned the mundane into the bizarre.
"Surreal Lives is an examination of the way art and politics influenced each other between the wars," says Brandon. "It sounds very grandiose, but it opened up all kinds of questions about the way politics influences what people write and paint. And it's about the nature of charisma - why people will follow one person who is a star."
André Breton was the guiding light of the movement. The young poet was a medical auxiliary in Paris in 1917 when he arranged to meet a friend at a tiny Montmartre theatre. It was a momentous evening. The play was by Guillaume Apollinaire, who coined the word "surrealism". On stage, a fat woman unbuttoned her blouse to reveal her breasts: two balloons, which she flung at the audience. Breton's friend, witnessing the birth of surreal drama, was Jacques Vaché. He was confident, cynical, with a black sense of humour; the very opposite of the awkward, earnest Breton. After his early death, his influence on Breton remained mesmerising.
With Breton as its core theorist, the movement grew, with Swiss, French and Spanish strands, and with a cast of rampaging egotists - among them Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Louis Aragon, Salvador Dali, Tristan Tzara, Louis Buñuel.
There are countless books on each of them, but Brandon realised there wasn't a collective biography, so she set out to weave the blindingly coloured, separate threads together. She places Breton at the centre: "Surrealism was his creation, built on his own character and as a reaction to very specific circumstances. He was neurotically homophobic, but he fell in love with Vaché, building his characteristics into a kind of temple."
An unruly temple of revolutionary art, in spite of Breton's attempt to lay down rules. Pretty much the position of Brandon herself when she started on the book. With such a wide canvas, verifying every last detail or chasing every survivor wasn't so important.
She spent much time at her home, mulling over the many books on the Surrealists and the notes she'd made from archives in Paris, and coming up with a thesis of her own.
It was a lonely endeavour at times. Sure, she's got a husband (an academic) and a daughter to care for, but faced with the quiet of her booklined room, "sometimes I'd ask myself, 'Christ, do I have anything new to say?' And I'd say, 'Yes Ruth, you do. Stick with the theme.' "
For Brandon, feisty, fiftysomething and used to researching a lone furrow, the doubts didn't last long. Others would be daunted, but she thrives on the challenge of constructing an intellectual framework, then cladding it with biographical material to form a book.
The formula can be worrying, but so far she has always made it work. A decade ago, she was fascinated by early socialists - Havelock Ellis, Shaw, the Webbs, Wells - and their notions about social and political reform, not least the sexual emancipation of women.
Digging among the Fabians, Darwinists and New Lifers, what did she find? "A huge contradiction between their public and private lives," says Brandon. Although females such as Eleanor Marx, Margaret Sanger and Rebecca West were intellectually equal to the men, they allowed themselves (with some exceptions) to be used "in the more old-fashioned way" by them.
You get the impression that these late-Victorian worthies wouldn't dare treat Brandon in the same way if she'd been in their circle. But how would she have fared as a contemporary of the Surrealists?
She has this in common with them: "I'm a kind of natural anarchist; not very respectful of institutions." But that wouldn't have been enough to allow her to enter a movement in which women weren't practitioners.
Still, that barrier didn't tempt Brandon to do a demolition job in Surreal Lives. Though critical, she warms to some of them, particularly Buñuel the film-maker. "He's the only one who's a truly great artist. Duchamp was a jokester. He's unquestionably been the most influential, but he copped out. Aragon was a second-rate poet. And Dali, he was self-obsessed and more or less psychotic."
She has a cold eye for their contradictions. The Surrealists were famous for playing jokes on the public, yet were humourless themselves. They despised the bourgeoisie, but happily accepted them as patrons. Now their work is safely tucked away in the world's great galleries, their revolutionary input spent. Time for Brandon to turn her attention to more dangerous trends: her next theme is the car, and how it changed life in the 20th century.
