To be a great gossip, the American critic Brooke Allen writes in one of these shrewd and often funny literary essays, you need 'a fine balance between delicacy and vulgarity and a naked joy in the foibles of others'. The gossip she's referring to is Nancy Mitford, and the occasion for her remarks the recent biography of Mitford by Selina Hastings. What Allen says could be the job description of a biographer, in fact - or for that matter of a reviewer of biography, since it's a well known hazard of writing biography that reviews of your books will tell all your best stories without mentioning the work you had to do to find them. (It feels a bit like plagiarism; but since your book plagiarised its subject's life in the first place, who are you to complain?)

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