Fever

During my apprentice years as a biographer, I could never quite understand this business of literary haunting. Writers much more experienced than I would appear in the press talking half-mournfully, half-ecstatically about the way in which their subjects regularly took over their lives. To hear them speak you would imagine that Catullus, Byron and Virginia Woolf were mostly to be found lounging round a Highbury kitchen, shoes kicked o, glass of Pinot Grigio in hand, waiting until their biographer emerged from their study ready for an evening of glorious reminiscence and high-quality literary chat.