Overdone and undercooked

This is a hopeless mishmash of a book. It is over 600 pages (736 with the notes), and it only covers a mere 24 years of its subject’s life. Some reviewers would say that it was badly written, but the trouble is, it isn’t really written at all. It is hurled together, without any apparent distinction between what might or might not interest the reader. Episodes of supreme importance in the subject’s life are given less space than such things as the film reviews he dashed off (with increasing distaste for the task) for the Evening Standard. One does not mean to be unkind about the author, who has devoted more than 25 years to writing Betjman’s life. But all he has done in this volume is to assemble a vast amount of material, some of it fascinating, some of it funny, some of it of quite staggering tedium, which might, one day, be of use to a skilled biographer of John Betjeman.