I had maybe a dozen New Year’s Resolutions in 2025, and I moved away from just about all of them, so I haven’t set any for 2026, but if I did set one, it would be throwing out books that I don’t want to read. As of Jan 9th, I’ve finished three books and DNF’ed four. I’m going to be much more liberal about chucking things this year. I can feel it. Normally I like to finish whatever I’m reading – and I think there are advantages to that. It’s good to practice reading beyond what’s easy or convenient. I feel like I benefit a lot from that structure – but I’m also seeing its limits.

The catalyst is this John Constable biography I’ve been reading. If you’re not familiar, Constable is an early 19th century landscape painter who’s often talked about alongside Turner. They both have a focus on the quality of air, on light and clouds and the sky. There are differences in style – art historian Kenneth Clark writes that Constable is invested in the “cult of nature”, while Turner’s method “consisted of transforming everything into pure colour” – and Turner is definitely more renowned (for example, he’s the namesake of the Turner Prize, a major award given to a British artist each year). Constable is sort of seen as his weird conservative art-cousin. There aren’t as many books about Constable’s work – for instance, the popular Taschen Basic Art series has a book on Turner, but not on Constable. There’s not the same abundance. I like Constable though. The NGV has his A Boat Passing a Lock, which is probably my favourite painting – I try to go and see it every couple months – and I’m loosely casting around for a good biography and collected works. I came across one biography by James Hamilton, a curator and art historian who’s also written biographies on Turner and Gainsborough. I decided to try it out – and it’s awful. It’s bad at every level, honestly in a really instructive way.

The basic approach is very detail-heavy, which is obviously not illegitimate, but it illustrates the types of problems at play. The risk of working in long form is getting swamped. It’s losing the forest for the trees, getting so bogged down that you’re not able to keep a coherent thread. It’s especially a problem when there’s so much historical record to work with. You read all this stuff and you want to share what you’ve learned – but the value of research is in how it sharpens your judgements about your subject. It’s not in how long you can talk for, it’s about the ability to make nuanced, informed comment. That comment can be ably expressed at almost any length. Julian Jackson has written both a thousand page biography of Charles de Gaulle (A Certain Idea of France) and a two-hundred page biography (De Gaulle), and the shorter isn’t worse for being shorter. They’re both underpinned by the same pool of knowledge. The shorter one is probably built on more knowledge, actually, as it’s published five years later. Hamilton, then, behaves in a way that shows a lot of reading but not a lot of synthesis. His biography is subtitled ‘A Portrait’ when really it’s an ensemble. Each of Constable’s childhood friends gets a full chapter, and in Chapter 6 there’s a paragraph that just lists a bunch of families that Constable knew:

“Other notable local families whom the Constables associated with included the Robertses of West Lodge, the Reades and later the Godfreys of Old Hall, the Rookes of Langham Hall, the Newmans of the Old Lecture House Dedham, the Whitmores of Dedham Hall, the Firmins of Rookery House, the Bridges of Lawford Place, near Mistley, and the Probys from Stratford St Mary.”

Again, this level of detail isn’t strictly illegitimate. It’s best framed as a sort of social history, a history of the context of Constable’s life. You see him here as one person among many, and you learn the names and stories of the people around him. You get a sense for the milieu. In the best-case scenario, that would feed back into a deeper understanding of Constable’s personality or actions – I think he gets lost amongst the crowd, but you can imagine what Hamilton’s trying to do.

Howver, within this already jostling, crowded book, Hamilton has a bad habit of speculating on historical details:

“He might have thought he would become another little Mozart.”
“He may already have talked enthusiastically to Reinagle about J.T. Smith.”
“They may have worked together in Beaumont’s painting room”

It’s such an indulgence. This is a book over-stuffed with historical minutiae, and even that gets supplemented with idle speculation. This isn’t the work of someone making precise, controlled analysis of Constable’s character – it’s someone working through the blow-by-blow, the exact timeline of every moment on the most microbial level, digging up all the available historical evidence and then leaping over it into speculation. It’s everything Hamilton knows and some extra stuff he made up. And – to be clear, there’s nothing inherently wrong with speculative or imaginative history. There’s nothing wrong with imagining yourself into the past, or giving a human narrative texture to facts and figures that might otherwise come off a little dry. The problem is the glut of detail compounded with more imagined detail. There’s no sense of targeted, surgical judgement. It’s almost greedy.

The whole thing is filtered through a haze of poor editing and proofing. It’s all in the past tense (“Ann Constable had her finger on the pulse of the Stour Valley”), except when it’s not (“Ann is a curtain-twitcher”); verb tenses don’t match (Edmonton could have “guided him towards art, and destroy his parents’ dreams” (should be ‘destroyed’)); and commas are left out or jammed in:

“The only way to win the love and affection of a young woman who was becoming increasingly interesting to him, was to begin to make some money and paint portraits”
“However, if the Western portrait, and Constable’s other early paintings on this scale gave him anything of of lasting value, it was experience of handling large canvases”
“Pike Watts was fully dedicated to turning John Constable from a Suffolk boy with huge talent but limited experience, into an artist of renown, connection and breadth of knowledge.”

It’s a mess. And I’d probably be fine with all of it if I liked the voice.

Voice is one of those magical, rarified things that’s almost impossible to define but at the core of the writing project. It’s easy to give it mystical, spiritual overtones – it’s the expression of the self, the artist on the page. It’s honestly better approached through examples. The writer’s implicit attitudes or beliefs are part of it – for instance, consider the way Hamilton talks about Constable’s future wife, Maria Bicknell, at the start of Chapter 17:

“When he was home, John had been charmed and enlivened over the years by the presence of this slip of a girl growing up, one who brought light to the village and joy to the elderly.”

It’s quite dated language. He speaks in the diminutive – she’s cute, sweet, tender. She’s a maiden, a fairy tale. He talks about her as a nice young girl because that’s more or less how he thinks about her. His imagination stops at her maidenly qualities. It’s couched approvingly in the gender roles of the time. We’re not talking about Maria’s actual personality here – we’re talking about the range of gender expression with which Hamilton seems comfortable. You get the impression he might be ill-equipped to deal with women who fall outside traditional gender roles. Imagine him trying to write about Ashnikko.

These overt beliefs or values are often part of a writer’s voice, but they’re not the whole of it. In some ways they’re sort of surface level. They don’t necessarily touch on style or rhythm, the music of language. Hamilton often has these sort of multi-clause sentences, stepping up and down across different levels.

“The young Reinagle, the firstborn of the family, was an infant prodigy, or so he claimed to be many years later.”

That’s a structure he particularly enjoys. He likes to name a subject, make some little aside about them, and then go on to say what he’s supposed to be saying. Subject, subclause, verb and the rest of the sentence. Here’s a few other examples from Chapter 17:

“He and his second wife, also called Maria Elizabeth – Rhudde’s daughter – lived in an Admiralty-owned house: 3 Spring Gardens Terrace, Charing Cross.”
“Having Maria and her sisters away at school or at East Bergholt, where experiments could safely be conducted, was a blessing for such a busy lawyer and his afflicted wife.”
“Her sense of obedience, which would emerge as the years went on in respect of her father’s expressed wishes, was a strongly developed character trait.”
“Stratton Street, Rhudde’s house in London, was – is – halfway along Piccadilly on the north side.”
“Durand Rhudde, an easy target with his worldly riches and local grandeur, has been fingered as the main blockage in the passage of John and Maria’s courtship.”

He’s always deferring the completion of meaning, splitting subject and verb with these little inserts that delay and delay. Sometimes he stacks multiple deferrals on top of each other, as in that first example. He and his second wife (who’s called this (and she’s this guy’s daughter)) lived here. Again, while it’s not strictly bad writing, it’s more complex, and unnecessarily so. It’s lumpy. It feels like stuffing billiard balls into a sock. The problem isn’t the number of clauses in isolation – it’s really how they’re organised. Compare, for instance, his much better sentence below:

“As father- and son-in-law respectively, Durand Rhudde and Charles Bicknell had a relationship replete with confidences, in which less perhaps was said than was understood.”

That’s a tidier sentence. It’s cleaner. Everything bends towards that central pairing of subject and verb – these two guys had a relationship. If you reshape that into the earlier structure (Durand Rhudde and Charles Bicknell, as father- and son-in-law respectively, had a relationship replete with confidences, in which less perhaps was said than was understood), that’s pretty straightforwardly worse. The verb is not particularly powerful, but that’s typical for Hamilton. He holds his billiard balls with a limp wrist. Having Maria at school was a blessing, her obedience was a strong trait. Stratton Street is, was, halfway along Piccadilly. It’s toff writing. It’s stylistically heightened, impersonating formal academia, but inflated and impenetrable. It feels quintessentially British – there’s something of the Oxford don in there. He’ll drop a name and then go off on a tangent before returning to complete the verb, almost presuming on the rapturous attention of the reader, as if to say – you don’t mind if we take a detour here, do you, I’m sure you’re terribly fascinated by all this? It’s disrespectful. Durand Rhudde, who, I’m sure you don’t mind me pausing to note, was this sort of fellow, has been – that’s exactly the sort of person who goes on about Maria’s beautiful handwriting, or her sense of obedience. This biography’s going in the bin. It’s 2026 and I can’t be bothered.