Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet, by Elaine Feinstein (Phoenix, £8.99)
When Ted Hughes's massive coffin was swallowed by the earth in 1999, he was already more myth than man. His demonisation as the brutal working-class Heathcliff whose adultery drove his first wife, the poet Sylvia Plath, to suicide would provide rich pickings for any literary biographer. As, of course, does his verse.
Steeped in a feral childhood hunting wild things on the West Yorkshire moors, Hughes's violent, atavistic poetry has a love of nature so fierce it borders on hate. The bestselling poet laureate also wrote children's fables like The Iron Man, and it's easy to forget the plague-black humour of earlier work. "In the beginning was Scream / Who begat Blood / Who Begat Eye / Who Begat Fear" (Crow, 1970) - it takes a bloody good poet to get away with lines like that, and one you might not want to meet over the breakfast table.
Disappointingly, this first swoop on the Hughes carcass is tamely unrapacious. Apart from a bit of obvious bias (Sylvia is portrayed as materialistic and demanding, Ted is all too loving and always does the washing-up) Elaine Feinstein's account is commendably neutral, avoiding cod-Freudianisms and hysterical blame. However, by the time Assia Wevill, Hughes's mistress, also commits suicide, gassing herself along with their young daughter, Feinstein's dispassionate eye is so blandly detached that we've lost any real insight into her subject.
Ted reaches 21 in as many swiftly dispatched pages and from Cambridge onwards the text of his life is filled with frustrating ellipses both personal (womanising is alluded to, but little more) and intellectual (his fascination with the occult is made to seem crankish). Ultimately our image of Hughes remains tantalisingly remote, a dark craggy territory here charted but underexplored.
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Iris Murdoch: A Life, by Peter J Conradi (HarperCollins, £9.99)
With her late status as celebrity Alzheimer's sufferer, Iris Murdoch has become big business. This authorised biography follows John Bayley's record of his wife's decline in Iris (1998) and is perhaps overly careful not to retread the same ground.
Concentrating on Murdoch's early years, Conradi untwists the mythologies of Anglo-Irish roots, charmingly evokes head-girl days, and attempts the almost impossible task of disentangling her multiplicitious love life, so that we're two-thirds of the way through before she publishes her first novel, Under the Net, at the age of 32.
From then on the going is slightly harder. The ardent philosophy student disappears behind a dry exploration of her later work and ongoing quest for a humanist morality, relating her thoughts to Oxford room-mate Mary Midgley and mentors Sartre and Wittgenstein. Impressively researched, accessibly written, but those who wept through the recent movie may be disappointed.
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