It may sound as though McAleer needed even more space than the 500‐odd pages he has taken, but that isn't so. No livelier man has been the subject of a duller book. The art of biography rests in selection, and what you omit may he as significant as what you include. This biography gives the impression of omitting nothing. Childhood and adolescence in the admittedly unusual Stout family get a hundred pages, the plots of the early pulp novels and stories are detailed at inordinate length (McAleer has dragged out from the files and dusted off 16 of them to make “Justice Ends at efficiently commonplace as might be expected), every fragment of propaganda activity is recounted in detail. The biographer's own comments are almost always jejune or banal.