Slowly the Poison

The lives of scholars and critics, however distinguished they may be, however resourceful their narrators, do not always make for compelling reading, let alone for an account that runs so readably to the phenomenal length of John Haffenden’s absorbing two-volume biography of the English poet and critic, William Empson. Devoted as they are to things of the mind, most academics do not, after all, generally do very much that is likely to command the attention of a wider public, or make for sparkling story. ‘A quiet life’ – the phrase in which Lord David Cecil summed up the career of the Cambridge don and poet Thomas Gray (whose one big adventure was to move, when teased insufferably by his colleagues at one Cambridge college, to the fellowship of another Cambridge college immediately over the road) – seems almost to epitomise this entire genre.