The new Karl Marx biography by Francis Wheen (4th Estate) fails to illuminate a man who was loved by his family and revered by his followers; instead we are given a hazy sketch of a petulant, perhaps incompetent man of few skills and little discipline, who nevertheless by some undescribed process managed to achieve eponymity during his lifetime ("At least I will never be a Marxist," says Marx in one of the better but still misunderstood moments in this book). Like many biographers, Wheen is disappointed and perhaps insulted to learn that even larger-than-life human beings have feet of clay, and his book is a long slide into self-satisfied sly digs and innuendo, which begin as his subject in his teenage years engages in student pranks and other devilments. Everywhere in this book is the aura of distaste: with atheism, socialism, with smoking, staying up late, talking too much, drinking, etc., and especially the distaste that comes with historical hindsight, last and often first resort of biographers eager to prove bright people in the past to have been completely wrong-headed, and not half as smart as their biographers.