I've written about pretentious windbag Pietro Citati in the past. Enough's enough, you might think, and I wouldn't bring him up again if I hadn't come across this in the back of my copy of the Gordon Burns' novel, Alma Cogan. It's one of those lists that sometimes pop up at the end of paperbacks in the hope, and why not?, of shifting a few more units. In this case, inappropriately given that Burns' book is fiction, it's entitled "Further Biographies Available from Minerva". It's clear from the first entry that the biographer is on the right and the subject of the biography, or its title, on the left. Dickens, in other words, wrote many things but a biography of Peter Ackroyd isn't among them. Which is what makes the third entry so amusing. It's almost a pity that Kafka didn't write a book about Citati, if only to get his own back on the vacuous old literary tart.
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