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“... specimen died, reduced by tuberculosis to a weight of 90 pounds. It is understandable, then, that Jeffrey Meyers should make much of Lawrence’s ‘lifelong invalidism’, and conclude his biography with an appendix called ‘A History of Illness’. Lawrence himself tempted biographers along this road by saying that ‘one sheds one’s sickness in ...”

“... places, and sits always with his back to the wall, paranoia seems a likely explanation. Jeffrey Meyers argues that in fact this was all a role that Lewis consciously assumed as a judgment of society, and therefore concludes that all of the many people who described Lewis as paranoid, or worse, were deliberately distorting his character and ...”

“... crushes’. Robert Lowell in Love examines Lowell’s three marriages and nine of his affairs. Jeffrey Meyers criticises Lowell’s selfishness and cruelty towards these women, but maintains that they suffered for a noble cause – poetry! His wives, all writers, were, Meyers also claims, ‘driven by the snobbish ...”

“... these are the things that stay in the mind when diagnoses and depreciations are forgotten. Jeffrey Meyers, who has done solid biographies of Lawrence and Hemingway and has now done one for Conrad, is particularly good on – as it were – the boots and the shoes. It makes his biographies not only readable but in their own way memorable, for their ...”

“... boxing were slow. But he threw his body into every sort of violent activity with gruesome gusto. Meyers has a frightful appendix listing Hemingway’s accidents and illnesses, over thirty of the former and some of them almost fatal. The cost was great. In For whom the bell tolls, which he wrote when he was about forty, he represents the 52-year-old El Sordo ...”

“... a monster of ‘appalling egoism’, through the last-but-one biography of Katherine Mansfield, by Jeffrey Meyers. But in correcting Murry’s emphasis it is easy to fall into another form of sentimentality which attributes all Katherine’s embarrassing mannerisms to his influence. Jeffrey Meyers describes only as ...”

“... to do with marijuana. ‘Long shot’ means ‘movie footage shot from a distance’. There now. Jeffrey Meyers’s biography of Fitzgerald is the sort of job often called workmanlike, although most of the workmen I know are subtler than this. Meyers goes in for simple, moralising accounts of instances which cry out ...”

“... the biographical facts, and then centre attention on the poetry, giving Frost’s art its due. Now Jeffrey Meyers has appeared, crowing that ‘the heart of Thompson’s biography was based on [a] lie.’ He proposes to reveal the truth – to wit, that when Frost was 64, after the death of his wife, he had a long affair with his ‘secretary’, Kathleen ...”

“... rug and scooping up ‘a handful of faeces like a guilty child’. In his new biography, Jeffrey Meyers quotes one of the two alleged witnesses denying all knowledge of ‘this nonsensical story’. Although he thinks that Maugham’s career boils down to a ‘struggle between sexual repression and artistic expression’, ...”

“... did Wyndham Lewis’s swaggering riposte to it, The Apes of God, the original edition described by Jeffrey Meyers as resembling ‘a cubist telephone book’ and weighing 5 lbs. As a Penguin Modern Classic, the form in which I read it, The Apes of God was unsuitably trim on the outside, feigning the sense of proportion that the contents had no time ...”

“... life and reading, and the comprehensive Hemingway (1985) by the indefatigable English biographer Jeffrey Meyers. Reynolds and Meyers stepped outside the ring where the mythographers and debunkers had slugged it out. Between them, and not without respect for the subject of their analysis, they coolly dismantled most of ...”

“... career before Bacall has been covered so often before, notably by Ann Sperber and Eric Lax, Jeffrey Meyers, and Stefan Kanfer. You may opt to hurry through the first two hundred pages to get to 1943. But from then on Mann the researcher, disinclined to fall for the myth, opens up a complicated marriage. The age gap did matter, along with Bogart’s ...”

“... the honour of completing the first full life to fall, almost inevitably, to the swift and prolific Jeffrey Meyers, whose biography appeared in 1995. Dabney’s is a more thorough and fully documented account, one which occasionally casts a sceptical eye over claims made by some of its sources, including those of Wilson himself. His biography is for the ...”

“... looking like round nasturtium leaves. Hemingway learned much from Kipling, and Kerr quotes from Jeffrey Meyers’s biography on ‘the importance of being Ernest’. Through the persona of Krebs in ‘Soldier’s Home’ he exploited his own need for mendacity. ‘To be listened to at all he had to lie ... attributing to himself things other men had ...”