This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
Now in his middle fifties, bearded, bespectacled and pullover-wearing, Eric Snapper lives in the terraced house in Ealing bequeathed to him by his mother. The late Mrs Snapper, whose memory her son venerates and whose photograph he keeps on his bedside table, also left him a considerable sum of money.
This, prudently invested, has been sufficient to subsidise the great business of his life, which is the writing of literary and historical biographies.
Mr Snapper began in a small way, twenty years ago, with a book about a minor Victorian poet named Esme Tulkinghorn.
It was a decorous, if not reverential study, and the reviewer in the TLS, whilst praising the diligence of the research, wondered if the author “had fully engaged with some of the more controversial aspects of Tulkinghorn’s highly rebarbative personality”.
By chance, in the very same week Snapper came across two documents that had the effect of radically repurposing his professional life. One of them was Stephen Potter’s essay on “litmanship” in which Potter advises an aspiring critic keen to make a splash to determine what his subjects are celebrated for and then accuse them of not having enough of it.
The other was a newspaper article about the American author Kitty Kelley, the orchestrator of many a celebrity takedown and a past mistress of the art of scuttlebutt.
His work has taken an unexpected, if not illogical, turn
Ms Kelley, Snapper learned to his surprise, was not a biographer but an “anti-biographer”, a disparager rather than an encomiast, bent on finding weak links in behavioural chains and breaking them in half.
Cheered by this discovery, Snapper abandoned his scheme to write a life of Charlotte Brontë and instead produced a combative work entitled Charles Lamb: Romantic Sadist.
One or two critics complained that the Lamb portrayed therein bore no relation to any previous portrait, but the book sold so well that Snapper was invited to choose his next subject.
This was a biography entitled A Repressive Life: The Timidity of D.H. Lawrence, which argued that Lawrence’s besetting fault as a writer was his “unwillingness to explore human sexual relationships in any detail” and ultimately convicted him of both “prudishness” and “emotional cowardice”.
All this has brought Mr Snapper an enviable, if somewhat contested, reputation. He writes cross reviews for broadsheet newspapers and sometimes appears on TV programmes glowering behind a pair of black-framed spectacles.
Just lately, though, his work has taken an unexpected, if not illogical, turn. Rather than accusing his subjects of not possessing the qualities for which they are famed, he has started detecting in them attributes which no previous biographer has managed to locate.
Next month, for example, will see the publication of Waves of Geniality: Evelyn Waugh and his Circle; a second work, Rather a Nice Man: The Life of Kingsley Amis is apparently in the press.
There are those who maintain that Mr Snapper is merely an opportunist. In his slight defence, it may be said that he believes every word he writes.
