Paula Byrne

We look to literary biography to understand how works of literature came into being and made their way in the world. But how much can we learn about the processes of artistic creativity from biography when the public self of the author almost completely effaces the private self of the writer: when we are left wondering how this person, of all people, could have created the works that bear their name?

Anthony Blanche stands on the high balcony with a megaphone. With practised stammer he recites The Waste Land to puzzled undergraduates walking below in Christ Church Meadow. ‘How I have surprised them!’ he assures the other Old Etonians gathered for languid lunch in Lord Sebastian Flyte’s rooms. In this single image, Evelyn Waugh fixes Blanche in our memories – privilege, aesthetes, the creeping arrival of bewildering new art to the Oxford of 1923.