Sadly, that was the one. I didn't mean that I thought it was worthless, though; just that his weird obsession with her appearance and weight was very offputting. I also felt that he got a number of minor aspects of the novels wrong, but can no longer recall which ones. I figured that his book probably really was one of the better ones, so I didn't want to read any more. My reaction may have been sharpened by having read a spectacularly uneven and in places just dreadful bio of Mary Renault at around the same time.

The Mind of the Maker is very strange. The first time I read it I was fascinated and wildly excited. I did not and do not believe in the entities that she was invoking, but as a means of organizing both the creative mind and the creative work I thought that her analysis was intellectually amazing and potentially very useful. I tried reading it again about ten years later and I couldn't, except for the passages in which she discusses her own work, which remained fascinating -- the discussion of the chess set in Gaudy Night, for example.

P.