This is already a famous biography, for all the wrong reasons. Permission has been granted, then withdrawn, then granted and withdrawn by the very picky estate; biographers have been commissioned, and then thrown in the towel at the insuperable difficulties. Some of the people who knew Green best have consistently refused to talk, or, I presume, to show what may be illuminating letters. Green was a difficult and a private man anyway; these added problems have, in the 25 years since his death, turned his life into one of those famously impossible projects, like the collected letters of Ronald Firbank. Jeremy Treglown is to be congratulated on producing any kind of volume. However much one regrets the loss of Paul Bailey's commissioned life, which would have been a splendid book - one superlatively subtle and scandalous novelist on another - it must be said that Treglown has more or less done what can be done with the available material, under impossible constraints.

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