More than ever these days, writers’ festivals and literary interviews encourage readers to interest themselves in the lives and thought processes of the novelists and poets whose work they read. Recently, for example, the first volume of a biography of Maurice Shadbolt had been published (Life as a Novel: A Biography of Maurice Shadbolt: Volume One 1932-1973). Most of the information contained within could be considered gossip, but at what point does gossip become literary history? Karl Stead doesn’t have a definitive answer, but he likes the question.