A Week in Books: Short lives

"A shilling life will give you all the facts," ironised W H Auden in a well-known sonnet. His poem sets the formal landmarks of biography against the secret places waiting to be discovered in any notable life: "Some of the last researchers even write/ Love made him weep his pints like you and me." For Auden, as a spiritual son of Bloomsbury, the "facts" of a public career will conceal as much as they reveal. Modern biographers tend to agree, delving into every hidden corner of the subject's soul. Their patron saint – also bred by Bloomsbury – is Michael Holroyd, whose intense scrutiny of George Bernard Shaw yielded four volumes and 2,000 pages from a decade's hard labour.

Which is wonderful, so long as readers of such far-from-brief lives can match the highest Bloomsbury standards of genteel leisure and unearned income. The trouble with the boom in heavyweight biography is that it has coincided with a fragmentation of shared public knowledge; not to mention a feeling of time-famine in the West. As the pace of change accelerates in society and education, fewer and fewer adults will know what "every schoolchild" allegedly once did. Just ask any teacher of first-year students.

We also inhabit the age of personality, when individuals rather than ideas illuminate the past and present for many readers. (Look at the comeback of "kings-and-battles" history, a classroom joke only a generation ago.) In such a climate, that "shilling life" may regain its role. Weidenfeld & Nicolson already publishes a lively series of short-haul biographies, in which strong authors interpret great careers – from Buddha to Brando – in a couple of hundred pages.

Now they have a competitor, in the shape of the "Life & Times" series from Haus Publishing. Barbara Schwepcke, the publisher, launched it in response to a suggestion from W G Sebald that Britain lacked an equivalent to Rowohlt's "Monographien" list in Germany. The Haus imprint will mix translations from that stable with original commissions. Cheaper than Weidenfeld's lives (at £8.99), they also draw on recent fashions in reference publishing to break up the text with copious illustrations, salient quotations and potted biographies. The likes of Wilde, Einstein and Kafka will appear soon. But the imprint has opened its doors with yet another life of Churchill, by the late Sebastian Haffner, and with Dietrich by Malene Sheppard Skaerved.

Both titles (at just under 200 pages) augur well for the project. The succinct Churchill from Haffner – a gifted refugee journalist who returned to postwar celebrity in Germany – fizzes with neatly crafted epigrams and snap judgements. The swagger and panache of Haffner's prose make him a suitable guide to the gaudy political theatre mounted by Churchill over more than half a century. Sheppard Skaerved, meanwhile, shrewdly traces the lifelong creation and re-creation of a global icon by Leni Dietrich from bourgeois Berlin. "Facts never mattered to Dietrich," she notes, although her own study meticulously shows how Marlene put the myths about her life to work.

It's oddly apt that Haus should begin its business with these two rapier-witted, image-obsessed, Hitler-hating showpeople. Although Churchill probably cared more for Pol Roger Champagne than sex, while Dietrich famously bedded almost everyone (from Yul Brynner to Edith Piaf), both came most dramatically alive in public. Neither was hiding a secret essence, available only to a tireless sleuth with 800 pages to burn. Sometimes, glittering surfaces – and even shilling lives – can tell the deepest truths.