SOURCE: Glendinning, Victoria. “Why One Prefers a Biographer of One's Own.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (23 October 1994): 2, 8.

In the following review, Glendinning asserts that Hamilton's Keepers of the Flame is entertaining and thought-provoking, but that it contains some factual errors.

What is posterity? Nothing but “an unending jostle of vanities, appetites and fears,” concludes Ian Hamilton at the end of a book that is quite surprisingly entertaining and suggestive. One might not suppose that a work subtitled Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography would give one cause to laugh aloud, but it does. Hamilton is a British poet, an editor and himself the biographer of Robert Lowell and, notoriously, of J. D. Salinger (well, he tried). For all his scholarship, he writes [in Keepers of the Flame] with the immediacy, economy and ease of a witty man talking over a bottle of wine.

The “keepers of the...