Biography
Edwards was born James Keith O'Neill Edwards in Barnes, London, the son of a professor of mathematics. He was educated at St Paul's Cathedral School, at King's College School in Wimbledon, London, and later at St John's College, Cambridge.
He served in the Royal Air Force during World War II, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross. His Dakota was shot down at Arnhem in 1944, resulting in his sustaining facial injuries requiring plastic surgery—he disguised the traces with the huge handlebar moustache that later became his trademark. He was a member of the Guinea Pig Club.
Read more about this topic: Jimmy Edwards
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“A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.”
—Richard Holmes (b. 1945)
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)