There is little structure or best practice in the concise biographical texts found in biographical dictionaries and Who’s Who volumes. This paper is a progress report on an investigation of using events as a structuring device for mark-up and metadata structures in biographical texts as part of a project entitled Bringing Lives to Light: Biography in Context [1]. The idea is that anyone’s life can be usefully decomposed into events at any desired level of granularity and that each event could be described as a 4-tuple of the four facets what, where, when and who.