I can only really comment on literary biography rather than biography in its entirety but if there's a better one than Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf, I haven't read it.
There is John Stubbs on John Donne, Humphrey Carpenter on Auden, Susan Brigden on Wyatt was any good. The endless paper given over to Shakespeare depends on pet assumptions so that Anthony Burgess, relating every legend and fairy tale, makes for the best if least rigorous read. But even if Hermione has a head start with the wealth of material avaiable in Virginia's friends, like Lytton Strachey, Vita Sackville-West and Ethel Smyth, hers is a consummately well-organized account in chapters lined-up on various aspects of the life in a beautifully coherent order.
In a life that blurred the boundaries between the life and the writing, it works like no other could be expected to and is worth reading simply as an example of the biographer's art notwithstanding the goldmine of stories, characters, literary history and Virginia that it contains.
The highlight thus far for me is Virginia's own account of her driving,
I have driven from the Embankment to
Marble Arch and only knocked one boy very gently off his bicycle.
I have a significant enough pile of books waiting before more are due at Christmas, and that is betting without being behindtime on writers like Sebastian Faulks who will just have to wait his turn, but while I don't want Hermione's Virginia to finish, I can see the end of it by now but it is an example of reading's most awful, skewering paradox- that one has to use up and move on from that which one most enjoys.
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With Carlsen and Caruana plenty good enough to extricate themselves from problems they bring upon themselves, the World Chess hasn't quite caught alight like it looked like it might have done in game 1.
In the quicker-paced world we now live in, it is always likely that the chess title will be decided in speeded-up games so the players can fulfil other commitments. Those days when one player had to win six no matter how long it takes are long gone.
At a much lower level, I achieved 1909 in the 10-minute discipline at Chess24, admittedly with many of the points gathered in games where the position was lost but I had played faster and the opposition's clock ran out. You only need a pawn left on the board once their clock says no time is left and that will do.
So I gazed at my pair of 1900+ ratings, that might not be repeated for quite some time, enjoyed them for a bit but knew that I couldn't stay in my tent like Achilles indefinitely. Heaven knows, it's not only physical sport I don't do any more, it's pub sport, too, and might even be poetry so one has to do something. So I left 1909 intact for 10-minute games and returned to my long-preserved 1903 at 15 minutes and, of course, very soon ruined it. But if ever I can get it above 1909, I'll keep that and return to 10 minutes. You can see the plan here.
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At least one can preserve something for posterity there.
Not so in the treacherously unforgiving sport of turf investment.
I e-mailed the Professor on Friday night with the outrageous claim that, at Wincanton on Saturday,
Going through the card is a penalty kick.
and I was right except I hit the inside of the post, the ball span along the goal-line, hit the other post and came out again.
6 winners and a third. Two races covered with two horses so four bets that might have landed odds of over 2000/1, and one of them all but did.
I hope the Prof doesn't get invited to Ascot by his bookmaker like he did last year because one can't turn down such an invitation but it's cruel to do such things to me.
After- what is it- 9 winners out of my last 14 selections, fate, or, yes, possibly a couple of desperate decisions by me, I'm down on the exchanges when I could have brought forward a life of self-indulgent leisure while the rest of the country suffers.
There's something a bit Virginia about it all.
Perhaps literature is all there is, elusive though it may be, plus Bach, Handel, Buxtehude and Mozart.
One really ought to have worked it out by now. 60 next year.
Over the weekend, in one of those moments you might sometimes have, I thought 60 next year and I think I passed into what some might want to call 'late middle age', at best.
And Bells on Sunday was the best ever, an 11/11 special from Westminster Abbey, Stedman Caters half-muffled. Completely the business. Luckily I have realized that I can set a series link to Bells on Sunday on the TV box and collect them, never miss one by being asleep at the abnormal times it is broadcast, and accept that when, in about 1971, I thought I'd never miss Pick of the Pops because it was essential, I was wrong. What I meant was, it will eventually be Bells on Sunday.