The Poet Laureate has won acclaim for his excellent biographies of Keats and Larkin. This time though, 'the overlay of legends' associated with Wainewright and the fact that he 'falls out of the historical record so often and for so long' made a traditional biography impossible. So instead he has turned Wainewright's remarkable life into a hybrid biography-cum-novel. Motion discusses his contrversial and highly entertaining life of the dandified friend of Blake, Charles Lamb, de Quincey and Keats.