SOURCE: "The Loves of His Life," in The New Yorker, May 19, 1997, pp. 78-87.

[In the following essay, Croce discusses the development of Frederick Ashton's career and his contributions to British ballet alongside comments on Kavanagh's treatment of these themes in her biography.]

Biographies of artists are notably tricky to write: the greater the art, the less there is for the biographer to get hold of. The artist's life is absorbed by that other reality which is the art, and what's left over—the husk of a life—is comparatively uninteresting. When the artist is a dancer or a choreographer, the biographer is faced with the special task of commemorating someone whose whole glory is to have disappeared completely, in art as well as in life. The great artists of dance disappear into legend, and they tend to blur together in our minds. Who now can really say what...