First published in 1995, David Nokes' major biography of John Gay (1685-1732) was the first full-length life of Gay for over fifty years, and drew on hitherto unpublished letters. Presenting Gay as a complex character, torn between the hopes of court preferment and the assertion of literary independence, Nokes offers both a lively and accessible read for the non-specialist and a comprehensive scholarly study. Best-known for The Beggar's Opera, Gay is here revealed as a contradictory figure. Nokes argues that Gay's self-effacing and self-mocking literary persona was largely responsible for perpetuating an image of himself as a genial literary non-entity. Often cast as a neglected genius, dependent on others, he in fact left a considerable fortune after his death. Depicted by his friends as both a childlike innocent and a rakish ladies' man, he produced the most successful and subversive theatrical satire of his generation, and volumes of bestselling Fables.

'Pictures of perfection make me sick and wicked,' Jane Austen wrote to her niece Fanny Knight a few months before she died. Yet most traditional accounts of Austen's life have insisted on portraying her as just such a picture of perfection. In his 1997 biography David Nokes re-examined Austen, and presented a far richer and livelier picture of the woman who once wrote in another of her letters, 'If I am a wild beast, I cannot help it ...'. 'A fine book, probably the best tribute to the genius of Jane.' Glasgow Herald '[This book] cries out to be read, not alone by fans of Jane Austen but by anyone who enjoys a great, witty, gossipy read.' Irish Times 'What fun Nokes's book is.' Fay Weldon, Independent 'David Nokes is assertive, energetic, opinionated, satirical, supremely confident, dramatising and gleefully splenetic.' Hermione Lee

David Nokes presents a gripping and authoritative portrait of Swift in his multifarious roles as satirist, politician, churchman and friend. Drawing on the most recent scholarship, he seeks in particular to re-establish a proper balance between Swift's public and private lives. 'The best biography of Swift to date.' Michael Foot, Observer 'David Nokes's book is splendid.' Denis Donoghue, London Review of Books 'Should remain the standard one-volume Life for years to come.' New York Times

Johnson, born weak and half-blind, shambolic and poverty-stricken, became the most admired and quoted man in the eighteenth century. Thrown out of Oxford for a lack of funds, he rose to celebrity: author of the Dictionary, a friend to the king, companion of Reynolds, Goldsmith and Garrick. David Nokes looks beyond Johnson's remarkable public persona and beyond the Johnson that Boswell to some extent created. Nokes looks at his troubled relationship with his first wife, whom he married for money but felt guilty about for the rest of his life; at his family, who haunted his dreams for years; and at his difficult, intimate relationship with Mrs Thrale. He shows a man who gave a quarter of the government pension he received to the poor, filled his home with the blind and destitute, and bequeathed his wealth to Frank Barber, an emancipated black slave brought from Jamaica. Insightful and engaging, Samuel Johnson draws an illuminating portrait of Johnson, his life and world.

In this new biography of Jane Austen, David Nokes plays master sleuth and storyteller in presenting the great novelist "not in the modest pose which her family determined for her, but rather, as she most frequently presented herself, as rebellious, satirical, and wild."