The real pleasure in reading Jerome Loving's excellent biography is less the literary criticism than the jaunts first across young America with a young Twain, and then overseas as he grows more established.

ECONOMIST: A man who never let anything stand in the way of a joke

Unusually, a little more literary criticism would have augmented the picture, especially some appraisal of Stevenson's chiselled, graceful style.

ECONOMIST: Literary lives