Splinters

The Literary Saloon notes the passing of biographer Humphrey Carpenter. Carpenter is one of those people who has kept cropping up in my reading over the last decade and someone whose writing I came to admire. At university I was impressed with his concise Oxford Past Masters book on Jesus and even more so with his doorstop-like biography of Ezra Pound, A Serious Character. To me, Carpenter had the gift of clarity to his prose, and wrote in a way that made the unintelligible understandable to me. At exactly this time last year I was reading his biography of Spike Milligan, which struck me as uncharacteristically bitchy about other biographers and Spike himself. (What a great triumvirate of subjects). Even so, I felt a distinct pang of sadness today that Carpenter will not be writing any more.