How much do we need to know about a writer, personally? The answer is that it doesn’t matter. Nothing or everything is equally satisfactory. Who cares in the end? As Northrop Frye has said, the only evidence we have of Shakespeare’s existence, apart from the poems and plays, is the portrait of a man who was clearly an idiot. Biography is there for the curious; and curiosity gives out where boredom begins. – Martin Amis, The War Against Cliché

Obviously, no full explanation of a man is ever possible. – Richard Rees, George Orwell: Fugitive from the Camp of Victory