I am not sure if you are limited only to classical authors, like Plutarch. But in imitation of Plutarch, John Aubrey (d.1697) would attempt to write short biographies of notable English figures in the later 17th c. He was never able to actually get organized enough to finish and publish his book ( not the first scholar with this problem) but that turns out to have been something of a blessing: no one censored it, or was ever able to dig into his papers and get rid of things they didn't like. So, there were a lot of great things left in it.

Because it was something of a mess, there have been a few editions of his Brief Lives. A pretty common one has been Oliver Lawson Dick's 1947 edition, notable for its corralling a lot of extraneous but fascinating Aubrey notes into a very long biographical forward. But Dick did quite a lot of editing, and left a lot of things out, so it's a "best of" edition. A few years back Kate Bennet published a scholarly edition with Oxford University Press that more mirrors the original mass of notes and other things that Aubrey left behind. I would start with a used copy of the Dick edition, and take on the Bennet edition if you get hooked. You may: Aubrey is great good fun.