Z lambasts a new biography of Hemingway for its ignorant assumptions and ‘psychologising’. Compares Hemingway’s photo on the cover (‘that terrible face—but good’) to the biographer’s on the back (‘isn’t he awful—so smug—and it’s taken by his wife, dear little woman’). ‘These bastards,’ he says, ‘they’ve never written a novel, they don’t have a clue about the writer’s life. They live all their lives safe in a university, with a wife and kids. They’ve got no idea of the risks writers take—I don’t just mean the risks on the page but the way we make ourselves uncomfortable in life, so we’ll learn things.’