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Books > Language & Literature > Biography & autobiography > Literary
Ezra Pound's greatness as a man of letters - poet, translator, critic, editor, pedagogue, universal correspondent - made him a central figure in the literature of the twentieth century. He was an exotic and controversial character throughout his life, and his public career achieved melodrama in l945 when he was indicted on a charge of treason, for broadcasting Axis propaganda on Rome radio during the war. He was eventually confined to a Washington psychiatric hospital for thirteen years. The final period of his life, after his release and return to Italy, was as dramatic - and tragic - as anything that had gone before. In this vigorous and fully documented biography Humphrey Carpenter carefully scrutinizes and often takes issue with the accepted valuation of Pound's achievements and his personality. He had access to Pound's vast correspondence - including highly revealing letters to his parents - and to medical records and confidential American government memoranda relating to Pound's indictment and trial. A Serious Character is rich in fascinating detail and acutely challenging in its judgements and commentary. Its title is taken from one of Pound's favourite sayings (first recorded in 1913): 'Are you or are you not, a serious character?'.
Ian Hamilton wrote two books on J. D. Salinger. Only one, this one, was published. The first, called J." D. Salinger: A Writing Life," despite undergoing many changes to accommodate Salinger was still victim of a legal ban. Salinger objected to the use of his letters, in the end to any use of them. The first book had to be shelved. With great enterprise and determination however, Ian Hamilton set to and wrote this book which is more, much more, than an emasculated version of the first. For someone whose guarding of his privacy became so fanatical it is perhaps surprising how much Ian Hamilton was able to disinter about his earlier life. Until Salinger retreated completely into his bolt-hole outside Cornish in New Hampshire many aspects of his life, though it required assiduousness on the biographer's part, could be pieced together. A surprising portrait emerges; although there were early signs of renunciation, there were moments when his behaviour could almost be described as gregarious. The trail Hamilton follows is fascinating, and the story almost has the lineaments of a detective mystery with the denouement suitably being played out in Court. 'As highly readable and as literate an account of Salinger's work from a biographical perspective as we are likely to receive' "The Listener" "" 'A sophisticated exploration of Salinger's life and writing and a sustained debate about the nature of literary biography, its ethical legitimacy, its aesthetic relevance to a serious reading of a writer's books' Jonathan Raban, "Observer" "" 'Hamilton's book is as devious, as compelling, and in a covert way, as violent, as a story by Chandler' Victoria Glendinning, "The Times"
As uplifting as the tale of Scrooge itself, this is the story of
how one writer and one book revived the signal holiday of the
Western world. "From the Hardcover edition."
This book, the second of two volumes anticipating the bicentenary of the birth of William Makepeace Thackeray in 1811, details not only the author's life, but also the cosmopolitan and literary worlds inhabited by his two daughters, Minny and Annie. Memory and Legacy continues the family saga long after Thackeray's death, tracing the later lives of his two daughters and their marriages. Minny would marry Leslie Stephen, later father of Virginia Woolf, but would die in premature labour at the age of just thirty-five. With her death, the narrative takes as its focus Thackeray's elder daughter Annie, as she overcomes the loss of her sister and goes on to build a life of her own. Encouraged in early years by her father, Annie would herself emerge as a successful novelist, though one always living, albeit willingly, within her father's shadow. In particular, she took responsibility for guarding and shaping her father's legacy until her own death in 1919. Drawing extensively on the letters, diaries, journals and notebooks of the Thackerays and their circle, Aplin sheds light on this remarkable man's family, and the effect that his life, death and legacy had on those closest to him. The first biography of the Thackeray family circle since that of Gordon Ray in 1958, Aplin's two-part study incorporates significant new documentary evidence, some of it never previously seen by Thackeray scholars, and includes the fullest and frankest examination of the lives of Thackeray's two daughters yet published. Illustrated with portraits, group photographs, and original sketches by the Thackerays, this book is a wholly new reappraisal of Thackeray's life, writing, and legacy through the lens that truly defined him - his family. It will appeal not just to those interested in Thackeray and the Victorians, but also to readers of biography, women's studies and memoirs, and to followers of Viriginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.
J. G. Ballard was, for over fifty years, one of this country's most significant writers. Beginning with the events that inspired his classic novel, 'Empire of the Sun', this revelatory autobiography charts the course of his astonishing life. 'Miracles of Life' takes us from the vibrant surroundings of pre-war Shanghai, to the deprivations and unexpected freedoms of Lunghua Camp, to Ballard's arrival in a devastated Britain. Ballard recounts his first attempts at fiction and his part in the social and artistic revolutions of the 60s. He describes his friendships with figures as diverse as Kingsley Amis, Michael Moorcock and Eduardo Paolozzi alongside recollections of his domestic life in Shepperton - raising three children as a single father following the unexpected and premature death of his wife. 'Miracles of Life' is both a captivating narrative of the experiences that have shaped this extraordinary writer's works, his distinctive outlook and his original visions of the future, and is also an account of a remarkable life. This edition is part of a new commemorative series of Ballard's works, featuring introductions from a number of his admirers (including Ali Smith, Hari Kunzru, Neil Gaiman and Martin Amis) and brand-new cover designs.
Ford Madox Ford is best known for two fictional masterpieces: The Good Soldier and the Great War tetralogy, Parade's End. Indeed, it was reading the former that first persuaded Alan Judd to write this superb biography. Graham Greene once strikingly pronounced, 'There is no novelist of this century more likely to live than Ford Madox Ford.' Even if that is debatable there is no denying his importance in the literary firmament of the first thirty years of the twentieth-century. He founded the English Review which can claim to have discovered D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. In the 1920s he founded the Transatlantic Review which published work by James Joyce, Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings, Gertrude Stein and Jean Rhys. Two of Ford Madox Ford's passions were conversation and women. It is often said he only seduced the latter to carry on the former! Alan Judd's biography is a brilliant rehabilitation of a literary figure who has still not been accorded his rightful place. On first publication it received dazzling reviews. 'It is a marvellous book, intelligent, sympathetic, comprehensive, worthy of Ford.' Allan Massie, Sunday Telegraph 'Mr Judd never bores. He is shrewd about the novel in general and Ford in particular.' Gore Vidal, Times Literary Supplement 'Indulgent, energetic, and immensely readable.' Richard Holmes, The Times 'Alan Judd has been drawn into Ford's embattlement and defends him staunchly and imaginatively.' A. S. Byatt, Guardian 'What Judd rightly emphasises is that Ford was a giver, believing that the preservation and furtherance of artistic talent was his permanent responsibility.' Frank Kermode, London Review of Books
The shocking, heart-breaking - and often very funny - true story behind Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. In 1985 Jeanette Winterson's first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published. It was Jeanette's version of the story of a terraced house in Accrington, an adopted child, and the thwarted giantess Mrs Winterson. It was a cover story, a painful past written over and repainted. It was a story of survival. This book is that story's the silent twin. It is full of hurt and humour and a fierce love of life. It is about the pursuit of happiness, about lessons in love, the search for a mother and a journey into madness and out again. It is generous, honest and true. 'Unforgettable... It's the best book I have ever read about the cost of growing up' Daisy Goodwin, Sunday Times **ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**
Keith Douglas was almost certainly the greatest poet of the Second World War. He was killed in Normandy three days after D-Day. He was only twenty-four. His short life was one of contradictions: the gifted artist and romantic, always in love with the wrong girl also enjoyed soldiering and was quick to volunteer at the beginning of the war. The brave and resourceful tank commander with the Sherwood Rangers in the Western Desert, in the campaign of which his Alemein to Zem Zem is the classic account, was also an outspoken critic of the military establishment and often in trouble with his superiors. There was always another side to Keith Douglas: difficult, even arrogant, he was at the same time, as Desmond Graham, observes in his original preface, 'generous, sensitive to the difficulties of others, remorselessly honest, energetic, and passionately, innocently open.' Douglas made in his brief life some friends who never forgot him, and whose memories of him have contributed much to this book. For this biography, Desmond Graham had access to much private and unpublished material. From that, interviews, Keith Douglas' own poems, letters and drawings emerges a definitive biography. 'an almost unqualified success . . . Mr Graham has used his material with great skill and tact.' Roy Fuller 'It is difficult to imagine a better biography than this being written about Keith Douglas . . . Desmond Graham provides us with an astonishing amount of information.' Stephen Spender 'extremely well-done . . It is written with authority and it will be standard.' Peter Levi 'sumptuously evocative' John Carey
Angus Wilson was a critic, lecturer and man of letters. Pre-eminently though he was a novelist, indeed, in the words of Paul Bailey 'no other novelist of his generation offered as complete and detailed a portrait of English society.' His first volume of stories, The Wrong Set (1949) - reissued in Faber Finds - launched Wilson as one of the most controversial, colourful and entertaining figures on the post-war literary scene, and he rapidly developed into a major novelist, maturing from enfant terrible to elder statesman in the process. Margaret Drabble's biography traces the influences of his bizarrely extended family, his years as a librarian at the British Museum - interrupted by a grim spell in the code-breaking huts at Bletchley Park - and his unexpected liberation as a writer. It portrays the dizzying progress of a writer and enthusiast whose work was at the forefront of English fiction for the second-half of the twentieth-century: above all it is a portrait of an artist of enormous courage, a man who confronted challenge to the very end. In his later years he became both influence and mentor for a younger generation of writers, including Ian McEwan, Rose Tremain and Margaret Drabble herself. Margaret Drabble knew Angus Wilson from the late 1960s and her biography is enriched with personal knowledge and recollections. 'He has been fortunate in his biographer . . . Altogether, with the assistance and consent of Tony Garrett, the dedicatee and second hero of the book, she has given a minute, intimate and candid account . . . of Wilson's hectic life.' Frank Kermode, London Review of Books 'A solid tribute of scholarship and affection' Penelope Fitzgerald, Independent 'No one interested in the story of modern fiction can fail to find this life fascinating. Its virtues - a bright, crowded canvas, warmth, a witty, polished style - are those of Wilson's novels . . . Through it all shines so human a picturer of a courageous, doubting, eccentric, driven writer.' Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times
Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) was a painter, poet, illustrator, dramatist, and most famously the creator of the "Gormenghast "trilogy. Very much his own man, and charmingly so, neither as an artist nor as a painter did he belong to any school or movement; his work was distinctive and peculiar to him. He was not a loner though, his friends included Graham Greene, Augustus John, Dylan Thomas and Walter de la Mare. His marriage to one of his students, Maeve Gilmore was a happy one, too. Parkinson's disease tragically curtailed his life. Malcolm Yorke's biography was written with the full co-operation of the Peake family who granted him access to letters, photographs and drawings never previously published. 'Yorke, aware of the many interpretations that have been imposed on Peake's trilogy, does not burden the reader with more. He catches, instead, through apt summary, the wide range of opinion on Peake's achievement, as poet, novelist, painter and illustrator.' Frances Spalding, "Times Literary Supplement " "" 'But his book goads the reader to search out Peake, and what more could that unique man or his family ask?' John McEwen, "Spectator" 'Most valuably, the book is generously illustrated with examples of the works discussed. There will never be a clearer explication of Peake's progress as a visual artist.' Michael Swanwick, "Washington Post "
The description 'definitive' is too easily used, but Donald Rayfield's biography of Chekhov merits it unhesitatingly. To quote no less an authority than Michael Frayn: 'With question the definitive biography of Chekhov, and likely to remain so for a very long time to come. Donald Rayfield starts with the huge advantage of much new material that was prudishly suppressed under the Soviet regime, or tactfully ignored by scholars. But his mastery of all the evidence, both old and new - a massive archive - is magisterial, his background knowledge of the period is huge; his Russian is sensitive to every colloquial nuance of the day, and his tone is sure. He captures a likeness of the notoriously elusive Chekhov which at last begins to seem recognisably human - and even more extraordinary.' Chekhov's life was short, he was only forty-four when he died, and dogged with ill-health but his plays and short stories assure him of his place in the literary pantheon. Here is a biography that does him full justice, in short, unapologetically to repeat that word 'definitive'. 'I don't remember any monograph by a Western scholar on a Russian author having such success. . . Nikita Mikhalkov said that before this book came out we didn't know Chekhov. . . The author doesn't invent, add or embellish anything . . . Rayfield is motivated by the Westerner's urge not ot hold information back, however grim it may be.' Anatoli Smelianski, Director of Moscow Arts Theatre School 'It is hard to imagine another book about Chekhov after this one by Donald Rayfield.' Arthur Miller, Sunday Times 'Donald Rayfield's exemplary biography draws on a daunting array of material inacessible or ignored by his predecessors.' Nikolai Tolstoy, The Literary Review 'Donald Rayfield, Chekhov's best and definitive biographer.' William Boyd, Guardian
New Directions is delighted to announce beautiful new editions of these three classic Sebald novels, including his two greatest works, The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. All three novels are distinguished by their translations, every line of which Sebald himself made pitch-perfect, slaving to carry into English all his essential elements: the shadows, the lambent fallings-back, nineteenth-century Germanic undertones, tragic elegiac notes, and his unique, quiet wit.
Dolly Parton is a country music legend, but also one of America's most beloved celebrities. Her warmth, spirit, and no-nonsense advice is embraced by millions of people who love her positive personality and encouraging attitude. In this colouring book, Dolly's inspiring words will be paired with equally inspiring designs to colour. Sample quotations include: "The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain." "If you don't like the road you're walking, start paving another one." "You'd be surprised how much it costs to look this cheap!" This clever and lovely colouring book series combines quotations from beloved wise women with beautiful black- and-white illustrations. In an attractive paperback format with foil embellishments, these books stand on their own as lovely art objects and impressive gifts.
Boswell's life of Johnson is incontestably one of the great biographies in the English language. And yet not even it can give a completely rounded portrait. It is for that reason Hugh Kingsmill hit upon the idea of assembling this alternative anthology: Samuel Johnson as recalled diversely by those including Johnson himself, Mrs Piozzi, Sir John Hawkins, Anna Seward (not flattering) and Miss Reynolds, Sir Joshua's sister. Here is an example from the latter: 'One Sunday morning, as I was walking with him in Twickenham meadows, he began his antics both with his feet and his hands, with the latter as if he was holding the reins of a horse like a jockey on full speed. But to describe the positions of his feet is a strange task; sometimes he would make the back part of his heels to touch, sometimes his toes, as he was aiming at making the form of a triangle, at least the two sides of one. Though indeed, whether these were his gestures on this particular occasion in Twickenham meadows I do not recollect, it is so long since, but I well remember that they were so extraordinary that men, women and children gathered round him laughing. At last we sat down on some logs of wood by the river side, and they nearly dispersed; when he pulled out of his pocket Grotius De Veritate Religionis, over which he seesawed at such a violent rate as to excite the curiosity of some people at distance to come and see what was the matter with him.' This is richly readable and informative volume offering an endlessly fascinating conspectus of the Great Man. It is being reissued at the same time as Hugh Kingsmill biography of Samuel Johnson.
Samuel Johnson was first published in 1934. It is being reissued to mark the 300th anniversary of Johnson's birth and the sixtieth anniversary of Hugh Kingsmill's death. In the words of Richard Ingrams, 'Samuel Johnson was the only biography of Kingsmill's written in a spirit of sympathy with his subject and it is for that reason the most successful of his books and must rank as one of the best short biographies of Johnson. Kingsmill had much in common with Johnson. He expressed himself best in company with others and found writing an arduous task; the circumstances of his life were unfortunate and he had the same habit as Johnson of almost courting discomfort.' Also being reissued at the same time is Hugh Kingsmill's anthology Johnson without Boswell.
Hugh Kingsmill should be better known. Here is a striking passage from Richard Ingrams' God's Apology. 'In Malcolm's (Muggeridge) study there was a row of books more thumbed and battered than the rest and a rather blurred photograph showing a man striding through a park, his arm swung forward, his air confident and jaunty. Malcolm called him Hughie. In his conversation he referred to him constantly, with great affection and in a manner quite unlike his usual rather disparaging one when talking of his friends. He seemed to be almost the only man in Malcolm's life of whom he had not a harsh word to say.' Hugh Kingsmill was a novelist, a biographer of note and a talker of outstanding verve and brilliance. He died in 1949 and to mark the sixtieth anniversary Faber Finds is reissuing Michael Holroyd's biography. It was Michael Holroyd's first book, originally published in 1964. 'A remarkably good book .' John Davenport, The Observer 'It is a positive pleasure to recommend Michael Holroyd's splendid biography of this exceptional personality.' Kay Dick, BBC 'The World of Books' 'A well-written study of a laughing, witty, clearly lovable man behind whose wreathed smiles despair lurked.' Anthony Hern, Evening Standard 'An admirably balanced and complete portrait, the criticism fair, the likeness true . . . I congratulate the author on a remarkably good book.' Hesketh Pearson, in a letter ' . . . impressively authoritative . . . entrancing and singularly profound.' William Gerhardie, The Spectator
Malcolm Lowry was the troubled author of Under the Volcano (1947), a brilliant novel about the last day of an alcoholic former British consul on the Mexican Day of the Dead, the manuscript of which Lowry rescued from the flames when his fisherman's shack burned down in 1944. Lowry's other books were not always so lucky: his first novel, Ultramarine (1930), was stolen after four years' composition and resurrected from a carbon copy; another manuscript, In Ballast to the White Sea, was destroyed in the 1944 fire. An early draft of In Ballast was discovered this century and published in 2014. Lowry's life, like his work, was often lost to chaos; Gordon Bowker's 1994 biography is a masterful account of a life spent adrift.
A. E. Housman, romantic poet and classical scholar, is best-known as the author of A Shropshire Lad and the meticulous editor of Manilius, the Latin poet of astronomy. In this first full biography, Richard Perceval Graves convincingly reconciles the two apparently conflicting sides of Housman's personality, and reassesses the reputation of a man who was something of a mystery even to his closest friends. 'This is bound to become the standard life.' John Carey, Sunday Times 'Dispassionate and well-researched.' Philip Larkin, Guardian
At the start of 1987, Primo Levi took part in a remarkable series of conversations about his early life with a friend and fellow writer, Giovanni Tesio. This book is the result of those meetings, originally intended to be the basis for an authorized biography and published here in English for the first time. In a densely packed dialogue, Levi responds to Tesio's tactful and never too insistent questions with a watchful readiness and candour, breaking through the reserve of his public persona to allow a more intimate self to emerge. Following the thread of memory, he lucidly discusses his family, his childhood, his education during the Fascist period, his adolescent friendships, his reading, his shyness and his passion for mountaineering, and recounts his wartime experience as a partisan and the terrible price it exacted from him and his comrades. Though we glimpse his later life as a writer, the story breaks off just before his deportation to Auschwitz owing to his sudden death. In The Last Interview, Levi the man, the witness, the chemist and the writer all unite to offer us a story which is also a window onto history. These conversations shed new light on Levi's life and will appeal to the many readers of this most eloquent witness to the horrors of the Holocaust.
The lyric perfection of the works of Alfred Tennyson, one of the greatest Victorian poets, and the apparent ease with which he wrote them, long obscured the disparity between the unruffled surface of many of his poems and his deeply disturbed life. Somersby Rectory, where Tennyson was born, was made miserable by drunkenness, drug addiction, threats of violence, melodramatic disinheritances, and above all by the fear of madness. He found an anodyne for his unhappiness in the composition of poetry, and was so successful in this refuge from the bewildering complexities of his life that he eventually became Poet Laureate and the most famous of living writers. Until he was forty years old the belief that he suffered from inherited epilepsy kept Tennyson unsettled, neurotic about money, immature in his relations with women, and apprehensive of marriage. It was a belief that gave shape to some of his finest poetry. At the end of his life Tennyson's wife and son constructed a public facade for him of irreproachable normality and respectability. Robert Bernard Martin was the first biographer to go behind the mask of the troubled poet to investigate his black-tempered morbidity, and neurotic secrecy about his private life. More importantly, it often reveals the sources of the successes and failures of the foremost Victorian poet. From many thousands of letters by Tennyson, his family, and his friends, as well as much other unpublished material, Robert Bernard Martin has distilled a sensitive and sympathetic portrait of Tennyson, both as his contemporaries saw him and as he was in private. 'Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart will stand as one of the great literary biographies of this century.' A. N. Wilson, "The Spectator"
It was as a small girl in Lincolnshire that Emily Sellwood first saw the boy Alfred Tennyson. Nearly thirty years later, in the year he became Poet Laureate, they married. What kept them apart and what eventually brought them together has never before been fully explored. This major biography radically alters the picture of the poet's relationship with his wife, establishing in detail the person Emily Tennyson was. It is the story of a remarkable family as well as a remarkable woman, bringing into the foreground a neglected and often misunderstood character a century after her death. 'Meeting Emily Tennyson in the pages of Thwaite's enthralling book is pure delight.' "Sunday Express" "" ""'A finely and deeply researched work, and clearly a labour of love ...She tells an ever absorbing story, and throws much light on that fascinating social area in which high art and worldly power meet.' "The Times" "" ""'This fat and well-documented book will quickly establish its place in bibliographies of essential Tennyson background.' "Literary Review" "" 'A magnificent, surprising biography.' Lynne Truss, "Mail on Sunday"
The two quiet lives are Dorothy Osborne, writer of the famous love letters to William Temple, and Thomas Gray, poet, Cambridge don and friend of Horace Walpole. They lived a century apart, but as David Cecil shows, were temperamentally akin. Both were reserved, introspective and prone to melancholy: both appeared awkward and difficult save to the few to whom they opened their hearts: both commanded a fund of humour and imagination and possessed an instinctive feeling for style: and both enjoyed an inner life which was vivid, strong and exciting. David Cecil's subtle and sympathetic study of two remarkable natures is a sustained piece of exquisite scholarship which reads as engagingly now as it did when first published in 1948.
Unfinished Adventure, published in 1933, is Evelyn Sharp's autobiography. It is a remarkable book recounting a remarkable life. Born in 1869, Evelyn Sharp was the sister of the folk song and dance expert, Cecil Sharp. A journalist, writer, pacifist and suffragist, Evelyn Sharp writes vividly about all aspects of her life: her school-days, Paris in 1890 , the Yellow Book, the Manchester Guardian, her conversion to Suffragism, her imprisonment in Holloway, her war work, her relief work in Germany and Russia in the nineteen-twenties, and finally, in her own words, 'The Greatest of All Adventures': the day she completed this book she married the campaigning writer and journalist, H. W. Nevinson. A. S. Byatt has described Evelyn Sharp as 'perspicacious, witty and a very good writer.' Evelyn Sharp and her autobiography deserve to be better known Faber Finds is very pleased to be reissuing An Unfinished Adventure at the same time as the Manchester University Press publish Angela John's biography, Evelyn Sharp: Rebel Woman, 1869-1955
Max Beerbohm is one of those figures, like Dr Johnson and Oscar Wilde, as well known as a personality as he is an artist. He was a superb parodist and cartoonist, and he was the leading wit and dandy of the Edwardian age. His very first book was boldly entitled The Works of Max Beerbohm (a collection of seven essays). He wrote mainly in miniature forms but his most famous work is his only novel Zuleika Dobson, a comic fantasy about undergraduate life at Oxford in the 1890s. David Cecil was appointed by Max Beerbohm to be his biographer. The choice could not have been more apt. Granted access to his private papers, David Cecil provides an intimate portrait of an odd, brilliant and most lovable human being, who was also a deeper and more considerable character than his facade betrayed. Besides being a picture of a man, this book is the picture of an age. In it the literary, theatrical and fashionable worlds of the 1890s and of Edward VII's reign appear in vivid detail as seen through the amused but penetrating eyes of Max: he knew everyone worth knowing in that era and had something to say about each of them. 'He has assembled all the available facts in a way to leave us grateful.' Evelyn Waugh, Sunday Times 'Here, exhibiting a small, delightful talent, is a large delightful book.' J. I. M. Stewart, Listener
First published in 1929, The Stricken Deer was the winner of that year's James Tait Black Memorial Prize and also the Hawthornden Prize: it was David Cecil's first book. For a time, towards the end of the eighteenth-century, William Cowper was the foremost poet in England. But David Cecil's biography doesn't celebrate a life of success, rather, in Cowper's own words, 'the strange and uncommon incidents of my life.' Cowper suffered from severe bouts of depression. His personal tragedy however enriched English literature: the fear of madness made him turn to writing poetry as a form of mental discipline, and isolation for the great world and from his own kind helped him to become the most enchanting of letter-writers. 'This is a sympathetic and vivid biography; it is subtle with a kind of gentle acuteness and vivid without literary ostentation. It is the work of a biographer with a clear head and a clever heart ... the rarest of all merits is the sensitive fairness of the of the biographer's estimate of character and situation throughout.' Desmond MacCarthy, Sunday Times |
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