Not since W. H. Auden's Academic Graffiti has a poet of serious substance indulged so thoroughly in clerihews, those miniature (and often outrageously fictional) biographies invented just over 100 years ago by E. C. Bentley (1875--1956). In Brief Candles, Pulitzer Prize winner Henry Taylor takes on with hilarious irreverence people usually taken most seriously -- members of the Supreme Court, poets laureate, literary theorists, Whitewater celebrities,...