Much like the micro-reviews readers can find in abundance on the Open Letters blog, often some of the best, tightest writing in the venerable London Times Literary Supplement will be found in the short “In Brief” reviews collected at the back of every issue. Case in point: the 13 February TLS The Thirty Nine Steps movie contains a review by the redoubtable Ben Morgan (don’t know him at all, but how can somebody with a name like Ben Morgan not

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be redoubtable? It’s so … Welsh) of Edmund White’s biography of the enigmatic Arthur Rimbaud, Rimbaud, The Double Life of a Rebel

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The X Files movies Morgan knows he has very little space in which to make his points, so he makes them with brisk economy, concluding, fittingly enough, with a comment on some of the side-effects of White’s own brevity (The Double Life of a Rebel is less than 200 pages long):

There are costs to White’s coolness. The awkward, besotted Verlaine, who left his wife for Rimbaud, often emerges more vividly than the boy himself. On the other hand, the book’s achievement is to write a Life which illuminates the work without reducing it to oblique self-revelation. Instead it gives the life the shape of the art, a fittingly Decadent agenda.

Of course, there’s still something to be said for the long review – where would Open Letters be without them, after all? – and readers curious to know more about White’s book can turn to our amazing first-annual Poetry Issue and read a full-length examination of Rimbaud, The Double Life of a Rebel, handled by our own enigmantic freelancer Gaston Frontenac. Alternately, readers curious to know more about White’s book could simply, as the kids say, “man up” and read the damn thing, which is, as mentioned, less than 200 pages and so is unlikely to, you know, kill you or anything. Just a thought.