Review of The Literary Larrikin: A Critical Biography of TA.G. Hungerford, by Michael Crouch

Abstract

Writing a biography is a tricky business. Perhaps most tricky, however, is to decide where you stand on the one hand to your subject and on the other to your readers, in other words, to decide where your loyalties lie. Michael Crouch, I suspect, has not really made a clear decision about this or rather has made several contradictory ones. Initially he seems to be concerned with the good opinion of his readers—especially those who will enjoy meeting 'a literary larrikin'—concluding his introduction by confessing the hope that he likes to think he has 'done justice' to his subject, adding self-deprecatingly, if a little anxiously, that it 'will of course be the critics and the public' who will decide whether he has done so.