SAM GOLDWYN NOTABLY remarked: 'Folks shouldn't write autobiographies until they are dead.' He might have added: 'Folks shouldn't write biographies until their subjects are dead.' If, in addition, the biographer has not merely been a friend of the been the subject's choice for the task, then the odds on an absolutely truthful, and therefore worthwhile, biography are even longer.

Eileen Warburton, an American, first met John Fowles in 1974, when she was a 26-year-old graduate student and he, as she puts it, 'was beginning to critique the critics'. Many years and many meetings later, Fowles agreed to her becoming his official biographer - permitting her both to read his