After-Lives

John Sutherland

• Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography by Ian Hamilton
  Hutchinson, 344 pp, £18.99, October 1992, ISBN 0 09 174263 3
• Testamentary Acts: Browning, Tennyson, James, Hardy by Michael Millgate
  Oxford, 273 pp, £27.50, June 1992, ISBN 0 19 811276 9
• The Last Laugh by Michael Holroyd
  Chatto, 131 pp, £10.99, December 1991, ISBN 0 7011 4583 8
• Trollope by Victoria Glendinning
  Hutchinson, 551 pp, £20.00, September 1992, ISBN 0 09 173896 2

A man of many literary parts, Ian Hamilton came to biography late and triumphantly with his life of the dead but still warm Robert Lowell. Riding high, he went on to attempt an unauthorised life of the aged but very much alive J.D. Salinger and was comprehensively outfoxed by the second most reclusive man in American letters. Hamilton wrote up his experience as a rueful memoir, In Search of J.D. Salinger. Keepers of the Flame is a further cogitation on the woes of biography, this time in a more objectively historical context. Hamilton offers 22 case studies, from John Donne – the first properly biographed English author – to Philip Larkin of last month’s Observer fame.