ADVENTURES IN BIOGRAPHY

A Chronicle of Encounters and Findings has its provenance in this British biographer's pursuit of his subjects (he has written full-length lives of many of the figures who appear here) and it is a pleasant retrospective journey- full of additional, incidental and peripheral material turned up in his literary prospecting through earlier centuries. In this scrapbook, there is a sketch of Oliver Herford, the expatriate Englishman and whimsical humorist whom the author met in America; there is a secondhand (through a camera portraitist) acquaintance with Robert Browning; there's a saddening account of the short and irregular life of the poet, Richard Savage; and there are sketches- and snatches of background information on Wycherley, Steele, Yeats, AE, Beau Brummell, Margaret Fuller, Chesterfield and Stevenson. It provides a personal frame of reference to greater and lesser literary lives and offers a pleasant example of the occasional, ambient reminiscence.