The telephone rang. It was my then editor: ‘We’re just planning the autumn catalogue, and I wondered if your book was going to make it.’ His call coincided with the arrival of a bank statement confirming that my overdraft was close to its limit. The answer was obvious: no, the biography of Robert Byron, already seriously late, would still not be ready for the autumn list. My other job as art consultant, which kept me solvent, had to take precedence. I put on my suit and tie, grabbed my briefcase, and re-entered the world of meetings, clients and deals. The half-completed chapter was elbowed to one side.
    
Many biographers, particularly those working on their first commission, know the effect of having to break off from such a complicated task. Success, as Mark Amory, the biographer of Lord Berners, explains, requires ‘taking a run at  it’. In his case, this was impossible, given his full-time job as literary editor of the Spectator. The contrast he admits, was ‘fiendish…ideally you need to be able to go off like Evelyn Waugh to a hotel in Devon for weeks on end, but of course one couldn’t afford it.’
    
One of the most taxing problems is coping with a glut of archive. Selina Hastings, at work on Waugh’s life, calculated that at one stage she had copies of 10,000 letters in her study. She likens the biographer's labours to those of her childhood heroine Marie Curie: ‘She had to process tons of pitch in order to distil one drop of radium.’ Peter Parker’s acclaimed biography of J.R. Ackerley took a mere two and a half years to write, but then, as he wistfully recalled, the papers of the literary estate, including diaries, ‘fitted into one small overnight bag’. His next subject, Christoper Isherwood (see Texts of Lectures), has thrown up a tidal wave of material, including diaries over a million words in length.
    
Interviewing surviving witnesses is often a race against time. Mark Amory once set off by train on a long-planned visit to a dowager only to read her obituary in that morning’s paper. Such conversations, when they do take place, are fraught with anxiety. ‘In the first five minutes of getting out of the car,’ one harried writer bemoaned, ‘you have to get them on your side, knowing that within the hour you are going to have to ask questions that you would never dream of asking your best friend.’ The most important disclosures tend to be the result of long and patient enquiry: James Lees-Milne only revealed the true nature of his final, dramatic parting from Robert Byron, which took place in the lift of the Great Western Hotel in January 1941, on my third pilgrimage to his house in Gloucestershire.
    
The practical challenges of writing biography also have to compete with the demands of everyday life, so memorably summed up by Cyril Connolly as ‘the pram in the hall’ – to which, nowadays, might pertinently be added the Zimmer in the annexe. Because writers are deemed to have flexible working hours, they expected to take on extra burdens. As I write this article, a builder has just called to mend the leaking roof; his chatty intervention is made even less welcome by the knowledge that his hourly rate is equivalent to the royalties on 140 copies of my book.
    
As the inevitable delay lengthens, friends and family skirt round the subject. At best, they open with the unappealing gambit, ‘I really don’t like to ask how you are getting on with the dreaded book.’ Some muttered to my wife, ‘Can’t he write faster?’ Others reassured her that all would come right when I got a proper job, as if my days were spent on a chaise longue inventing aphorisms. Rich businessmen, on the other had, often express envy at a writer’s  life. One was taken aback when I suggested that only now, after a long career in banking, was he rich enough to become an author.
    
Publishers appear to avert their eyes from the fading delivery date on the contract. (An attitude of benign neglect is commercially feasible with first-time biographers, as the advance is usually too small to pose a risk to the balance sheet.) One suffering writer received a call from his editor announcing that she was moving on. ‘Now,’ she told him cheerfully, ‘I’m no longer going to have to see you dodging behind pillars at literary parties to avoid me.’ No tyro writer wants the publisher breathing down his neck, but neither, deep down, does he want to be ignored. Learning to write is a lonely occupation, and practical support should be on offer. My saviour was a brilliant reader, living deep in the fens, whose comments and suggested cuts –  akin to the advice of a sympathetic tutor – inspired me to complete the last lap of the marathon.
    
In retrospect, his scrutiny would have been even more valuable earlier in the process, providing vital encouragement during the frequent troughs that beset the long-distance biographer. The depression is rooted in intellectual exhaustion.  Nothing, for me, has ever been so difficult: surviving business school, running a magazine on the edge, founding my own company, were all easy by comparison. Resentment was intensified by knowing that the job was virtually unpaid.
    
My lowest moment arrived one gloomy winter’s afternoon when some errand took me past my old office in Doughty Street. A particularly difficult passage in the book had just been completed, but I was still only half way through Byron's life. The lights of the Spectator were ablaze. Jennifer Paterson was drinking her usual vodka out of a coffee mug; Mark Amory was chatting blithely on the telephone. A sense of utter defeat overwhelmed me. All had yet to be proved. Rather than saunter in to meet old friends, I slunk home filled with self-hate at my slowness, with envy at my subject for his dynamism and range of intellect (so different from my own sedentary, second-hand life) and with panic at the prospect of my next bank statement.
    
The book is finished and published. I cradle the new-born in my hands, conveniently forgetting, for a moment, the pain of gestation. Instead, the reasons for battling on predominate: the satisfaction of imposing order upon the dynamic chaos of a life, of exploring vanished worlds, and, above all, of narrating a remarkable story shot through with comedy, passion, heroism and tragedy. All romantic notions, however, of writing biography have evaporated. Clear-eyed, one considers future projects. Nothing is out of the question, but the choice of subject might well hinge upon whether the archive fitted into a small overnight bag.