The Auden Ackroyd is really interested in is the romantic Auden who wrote that gorgeous love poetry and who was distraught at his long-term partner Chester Kallman’s infidelities.

“A shilling life will give you all the facts” – thus Auden’s dismissal of biography in Who’s Who. The best part of a century on, and Peter Ackroyd’s Auden will set you back rather more than a 5p piece. But there is no denying that it has all the facts. Though it lacks notes, and though its bibliography fails to mention reviews and articles that are quoted from in the text, the book makes plain that Ackroyd and the two research assistants he acknowledges have been through pretty much everything ever written by and about the greatest English poet of the twentieth century.

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