Papa on the warpath

In 1961, when he was 62, Ernest Hemingway shot himself. Almost half a century later, this bombastic, vainglorious, paranoid man, whose writing captured the minds not only of his own generation but of all subsequent ones, still exercises a powerful attraction for biographers. Though no one has yet written a better account of Hemingway’s unhappy and driven life than Carlos Baker, whose 700-page volume appeared in the late 1960s, scholars, historians, journalists and biographers continue to tease out little known aspects of it, chipping at fragments of the past, rearranging them into new patterns and mosaics.

In The Breaking Point, Stephen Koch has turned to the Spanish civil war, following Hemingway, Dos Passos and dozens of other Americans and Europeans drawn to the loyalist side and moving around Spain as Franco gradually tightened his hold on the country. Hemingway and Dos Passos had first met in Italy in 1918, when they were both evacuating casualties from a field hospital at the front.