Now the agent is increasingly the secondary producer creating and finessing the product which he then allows the

Now, the agent is increasingly the secondary producer, creating and finessing the product, which he then allows the publisher to market - rather like an independent Hollywood producer licensing his work to a major studio. At the same time, with a dearth of editors, agents were able to exert much more of an influence on the material they sold, frequently employing their own editorial staff to knock manuscripts into shape.The upshot, a decade and a half later, has been that the publishing- business model has been turned on its head. Threaten to take Jack Higgins or Freddie Forsyth away from publisher X, and publisher X would listen to you. At the same time, everyone was making staff cuts, especially in editorial departments.

The big agents emerged from this explosion with a vast increase in their power and prestige. They were dealing with fewer people and publishing fewer books, which meant that the best-selling authors they represented were even more valuable. Enormous amounts of money were suddenly available, and advances skyrocketed. From about 1980 onwards, in an atmosphere of profound economic uncertainty but buttressed by huge adhesions of (mostly) foreign cash, the previously timid and mostly independently- run British publishing scene changed out of all recognition Small firms agglomerated to produce big firms. One of Hill's English authors, arriving at her office in New York, was startled to be told that she'd just set sail for England, believing that the new wife of one of her best clients wasn't up to the task of keeping her husband off the drink.But the real boost to agent power came in the early 1980s publishing shake-up, the detonation of ancient practices and attitudes to money from which even now the industry is still recovering. They may have been prima donnas; equally their notions of author care went beyond generally accepted standards.

But agents like Hill and the equally flamboyant - and alcoholic - Carl Brandt (to whom Hill was briefly married) brought a new dimension to the idea of paying someone to get a better price for your book than you could otherwise do yourself. The rewards on offer were greater, and they encouraged the kind of flamboyant personalities discouraged on this side of the Atlantic. "That Mrs Hill, giving herself such airs," the proprietor of Cosmopolitan used to sniff over the famous Carol Hill "And she is only an agent". "That was my literary agent."Predictably, the agent's rise up the professional scale began in America.

One of PG Wodehouse's Mulliner stories, for instance, contains a character whose novel-scribbling fiancee is seen attending the theatre with a saturnine male escort "Who was that man I saw you with last night?" he barks out "That wasn't a man," Evangeline sweetly replies. The status of the early practitioners such as JB Pinker and A.P Watt - the latter still a powerful operator a century later - wasn't high. Although early Victorian literature is full of friendly representations and polite words being put in, as a species the literary agent barely existed until the end of the 19th century. Effectively, many a top literary agent doubles up as a surrogate management consultant, along the lines of "You can't do that, HarperCollins/ Viking Penguin because my client wouldn't like it".From the vantage point of history, all this has happened in a comparatively short space of time. Not only is manuscript- broking extremely profitable - big outfits such as Peters Fraser & Dunlop, Rogers Coleridge & White and Aitken & Stone may turn over only a few million a year, but then where are their overheads? Such is the clout of top operators, and the desire among publishers not to offend the people they represent, that any kind of industry restructuring (a big publisher reorganising its trade division, say) often finds them intervening personally in the round of hirings and firings. Marcel Proust by George Painter (two volumes: 1959 and 1965)9 Victoria R I by Elizabeth Longford (1964)10 Disraeli by Robert Blake (1966)11. All are examples of the finest writing in biography in the 20th century Try one and see..

1 Father and Son by Edmund Gosse (1907) 2 Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey (1918) 3. The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography by A J A Symons (1934)4 Florence Nightingale by Cecil Woodham-Smith (1950)5 Hitler: A Study in Tyranny by Alan Bullock (1952)6. Sigmund Freud: Life and Work by Ernest Jones (three volumes: 1953,1955 and 1957)7 James Joyce by Richard Ellmann (1959)8. In terms of pure scholarship, some of the chosen 30 may have been superseded since publication because of advances in our knowledge of the subject; some, for instance, represent important shifts in the treatment of sex, or of the monarchy, or of the thorny subject of political correctness. Thirty of the best biographies published in English this century, listed in chronological order. Barry Unsworth's Losing Nelson centres on a faithful biographer of the great admiral, who apparently suffers from an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder in his devotion to his biographical subject.And now to my list.