Without question, of all the departed Victorian Olympians, Algernon Charles Swinburne is the least burdened by biographies. This is now being attended to, for Swinburnean studies have marched dramatically forward since Edmund Gosse's sanforised biography of 1917, and Harold Nicolson's scarcely less well-laundered life of 1926, although it was not until 1974 that Philip Henderson's Portrait presented some of the fuller lineaments, such as those sketched in the biographically revelatory ...