Britain v. America -- Wordsworth v. Coleridge -- Baleful fictions -- Nabokov v. Wilson -- Richardson v. Fielding -- "Every word she writes is a lie" -- Thackeray v. Dickens -- "You haf de Nobel Brize" -- Hemingway v. Stein, Toklas and Anderson -- The two cultures -- Biographers' tales -- J.C. Squire v. Modernism -- The duellists -- Rushdie v. Islam