His Jewish identity is crucial to the understanding of Leonard Cohen. His maternal grandfather was a noted rabbi and scholar and he was steeped in his religion as a boy. It seeps into many of his poems and songs, despite an overlay of Christianity and Zen Buddhism, the religion to which he has devoted much of his adult life. The melancholic nature of most of his work is no pose: he has suffered severe depression for much of his life, and alcohol and drugs, ingested in prodigious quantities by Simmons's account, predictably provided no lasting answers. 

Spirituality, or the search for it, has been a central pillar of Cohen's life: he even spent five years, on and off, in a Buddhist monastery in California, although he was always able to disappear off to Los Angeles, where his first stop was McDonald's for a Filet-O-Fish, to be followed by a bottle of good wine when he got home. It is surely not unfanciful to link his devotion to his Master, a Japanese centenarian named Roshi, with the loss of his own father so young. But one feels that deep down he is just as influenced by Rashi as by Roshi.

Cohen went back on the road not to relive his youth but for a more prosaic reason: he was broke. He had never taken the slightest interest in money, and it took a friend to point out that it had all gone. When his manager died, he entrusted his affairs to the man's personal assistant, a pretty young woman with whom Cohen inevitably had an affair. When the alarm was finally raised, years later, a mass of litigation followed and the courts found for Cohen, to little avail: there was no money to hand back. My proof copy of the British edition of Simmons's biography has several passages relating to this business blacked out with felt-tip pen, evidence that the matter remains highly sensitive to someone. Cohen scholars are recommended to compare the US and UK editions to work out exactly what. 

Never mind: thanks to the extraordinary success of his recent world tours Cohen has got all his money back and then some. More than that, he has demonstrated that he has finally reached a plateau of something approaching serenity. And his fans will be pleased to hear a final remark to his biographer: "I have no sense of or appetite for retirement."