A shilling life will give you all the facts, or at least a £20 one will. And in the case of Humphrey Carpenter it comes with a guarantee of research, honesty and fair play. Nothing flash, no tricks of style and perhaps not too much humour, but at the end a feeling that what you have read has been as close a likeness as you will get. Auden and Pound, Tolkien and Benjamin Britten, all subjects of Carpenter biographies, not one of them has much of a case for appeal.
But his biography of Spike Milligan is different. It has a tension, for, while the author seems to have set out to write a celebration of a man whose Goon Show scripts had made him laugh as a boy, it ended up as not that at all: in the process he began to dislike him.
Part of the trouble is that Carpenter, unlike Milligan, is quite a serious man.
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