Briefing note: Writers’ lives, pt 1

If you’re the sort of person who can’t get enough of literary biography then you’re spoilt for choice this autumn. Our bookshops – what’s left of them – are bursting with writerly lives and letters.

Here’s what the critics made of the ten most-talked-about titles:

Martin Amis: The Biography by Richard Bradford

This sympathetic biography has got some pretty dreadful reviews, as you’ll know if you’ve read the Spectator’s Briefing Note.

David Sexton’s hatchet job in the Evening Standard was the most brutal.

‘His book is unreadably poor. He can’t write for toffee … What can Martin Amis feel now, to discover that such a dimwit should be fated to be his biographer, forever first in his bibliography?’

Some critics have been more generous. Writing in the Independent, DJ Taylor thought the book had three redeeming features:

‘The first is the rambunctious presence of Christopher Hitchens, who dishes the dirt on everything from the sexual shenanigans to the early 1980s research trip to a New York “hand-job parlour” while researching Money.