IT'S THE AGE OF BIOGRAPHY AND it's the age of how-to books: a structuralist could say with some justice that permutations and combinations had a hand in writing this book. But it has a flesh and blood author too. Nigel Hamilton has written biographies of Monty and JFK and here shares his experiences and others' examples: Robert Caro and his mammoth life of LBJ, Edmund Morris' non-fiction novel life of Ronald Reagan, Dutch, which met with universal dismay when it was published in 1999, and Hermione Lee's life of Virginia Woolf.

Hamilton looks at where to begin and where to end, the importance of primary research and how to do interviews, and there is a chapter on love lives and the question of prurience: the Chicago Sun-Times reviewer called Hamilton's biography of Bill Clinton "sleazy, snide, cynical and very dirty", and his biography of JFK was compared by another reviewer to a trashy novel. Hamilton doesn't state the obvious, that certain lives just can't be treated demurely without simply missing the point.

The book is full of good advice and interesting stories but the manner is oddly chatty as if the writing of fully researched and footnoted biographies were a popular hobby such as gardening or making your own homepage, or, I guess, researching your family history.

It's not so obtrusive that it makes the book not worth looking at, though.