Fight and Kick and Bite [antikvár]

Preface 'Quotations can be used like bludgeons in insensitive hands.' Dodgson, The newcomer to biography enters two territories, both of which look relatively familiar and yet are full of traps for the unwary. One of them is the world of the book's subject, much anticipated and yet (thankfully) full of discovery. The other is the strange biosphere of biography itself. This book is a critical biography of Dennis Potter. That is not to say that it is an attacking portrait; rather that it attempts to analyse and evaluate Potter's work in the context of the circumstances of his life. I hofje many other books and studies of all kinds will come to be written about an artist who takes his place among the most significant of the second half of this century. One of the more alarming outcrops in the biographical biosphere is the literary estate. The would-be biographer approaches it with trepidation for it guards the paper leavings, both grandiloquent and trivial, of the departed. In my case, I have not asked for access to any material that has not already been exposed to public view. My analysis is of what is on the record. To the 'official' biographer goes the honour (or the exhilaration or the responsibility or the chore) of examining the private papers, insofar as the estate permits. I wish him only joy of them. But there are more ways of killing a cat, Charles Kingsley argued, than choking her with cream. My own draws heavily on what my subject himself wrote and said, on the assumption that the actual top-of-the-milk is always going to be preferable to any manufactured cream-substitute of my own. In my defence I call up no less an