A superb biography and a magnificent resurrection of the great eighteenth-century novelist, by the author of the highly-praised Cyril Connolly: A Life.
Jeremy Lewis spent much of his life working in publishing. He is the author of two highly-praised volumes of autobiography, Playing for Time and Kindred Spirits, and of biographies of Cyril Connolly and Tobias Smollett.
Lewis apologises for writing a non-scholarly biography but the book is all the better for it, being both hugely readable and remarkably informative on 18th century life and literature.