Bookable ...

... Lives Less Ordinary. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

... I was very much looking forward to my task when, in 2005, I was asked by the Spectator to review Douglas Parker’s 2005 biography of Nash. If only I had known. Nash, you see, was a hardworking light versifier who sometimes lived in Baltimore and sometimes in New York, loved and remained faithful to his wife, wrote regularly for The New Yorker though he had occasional minor tiffs with them, and died at 68 leaving nobody with a bad word to say about him. Parker’s biography records all this with perfect competence—and golly gosh is it a dull read, even at its restrained 300-odd pages. Nothing happened in the man’s life. It fails, in Nash’s coining, to fassinet.

By contrast, Andrew Wilson’s recent life of Harold Robbins—one of the most inept makers of sentences the world has ever seen—was a corking read, Pelion-upon-Ossa of vulgarity, drug-abuse, and fast living. Who wouldn’t rather read a biography of Robbins than of, say, solid old Wallace Stevens—even if Harmonium is better than The Carpetbaggers?