Germaine Greer described biographers as ‘vultures’. I prefer to think of myself as a version of Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade: vultures hunt by instinct but the two private investigators went after secrets with deliberate foolhardy masochism.
It’s human nature to want to know more about the writers we admire — but what you discover isn’t always pleasant.
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David Butterfield
Most-read 2024: Decline and fall – how university education became infantilised
Most recently, I completed a life of Ernest Hemingway. It was a joy to write mainly because after reading thousands of unpublished letters I felt relieved at having been spared an encounter with the living ‘Papa’. I knew of his reputation as a fibber but I was astonished to find that from his teens onwards he was pathologically incapable of distinguishing fantasy from truth. He entertained friends and family, wives included, with stories of his heroics as a member of the crack Italian regiment the Arditi on the Austrian front at the close of the first world war.
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