Pretty Letters

Megan Marshall

  • BuyPoe: A Life Cut Short by Peter Ackroyd
    Chatto, 170 pp, £15.99, February 2008, ISBN 978 0 7011 6988 6

Where to begin? It’s the biographer’s fundamental dilemma. These days it’s a rare biography that opens with a recital of its subject’s pedigree, then works its way methodically from cradle to grave. Chronology is both a gift and a curse, offering an attractively simple narrative structure but risking the tedium of ever-forward motion. Why not borrow the sure-fire novelistic tricks of flashback and flash-forward to elude that soporific ‘and then’?

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