NIGEL HAMILTON’s ACCOUNT of Bill Clinton’s life and early career – up until the Arkansas governor was elected President in 1992 – must surely rank as the most peculiar political biography ever written by a respectable academic author. The book is hvided into fragments (typically a page and a half long), each suggestive of a scene in a television docu-soap. Smart wheeze, you’d think: saves on adaptation costs. But the writing doesn’t match up to the standards of the genre, tending to mimic instead the breathless style of TV preview columns, right down to their exasperatingly inappropriate exclamation marks!

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