Candle Moments

Andrew O’Hagan

  • BuySemi-Invisible Man: The Life of Norman Lewis by Julian Evans
    Cape, 792 pp, £25.00, June 2008, ISBN 978 0 224 07275 5

Until recently, the art of modern biography was too little influenced by the man who invented it, James Boswell, and, even today, many of those who set out to write the lives of authors seem to be led by a suspicion that everything of interest about the subject might already have been said by the subject himself. The literary biographer is haunted by Nabokov’s stylishly defensive comment that the only biography of a writer that matters is the biography of his style.

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