Novelists, poets and playwrights live double lives, sharing the real world with everyone else while spending a good deal of time in a universe of their own making. When they fall out with each other they seem able to kindle feuds as passionate and as public as workers in any trade. 

Richard Bradford's highly entertaining book looks at some of the closest and most complex friendships in literary history and examines the dramatic effects on relationships and on literature itself. Figures covered here include Nabokov, whose novel Lolita originated from a festering argument with his erstwhile friend the esteemed critic Edmund Wilson.