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A Double Life
A Double Life
Jan 12, 2025 7:03 PM

Author:Sarah Burton

A Double Life

The little known story of the inseparable brother and sister, lights of the Romantic circle, privately haunted by madness

Wordsworth thought that if there were such a thing as a good man, it would be Charles Lamb, while Hazlitt believed Mary Lambto be the only sensible woman he knew. The couple's literary reputation rested partly on the famous Tales from Shakespeare. And yet there was an unhappier side: Charles was an alcoholic and Mary, in an attack of insanity, stabbed their mother to death.

This fascinating account reaches to the heart of early nineteenth century London, meeting its eccentrics and its literary giants. It also visits the city's darker corners, where poverty stalks rented rooms and madhouses conceal terrible abuse.

Reviews

This excellent collection of essays certainly lives up to the grand claim of its title. Unusual and highly successful. Quite possibly one of the best summaries of modern historical theory available

—— Good Book Guide

Liza Jardine, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Ian Kershaw, Richard Evans; some of the leading contemporary historians have been assembled in this innovative work. Enlightening little book. Learned yet accessible. Stimulating and thought-provoking

—— Glasgow Herald

Quizzing the world's best historians, this book finds answers to the most frequently asked questions about the course of world events. The results are sometimes unexpected but always relevant to how we live today

—— BMI Magazine

'Racy and imaginative...sympathetically and readably puts flesh and bones on one of history's most turbulent characters'

—— Sunday Telegraph

'Man's excellent writing breathes new life into a character whose spirit lives on in China and Mongolia today'

—— Historical Novels Review

'Man is an excellent guide...well-versed in Mongolian, he has travelled extensively in the country while researching the more mysterious elements Genghis' life, and this experience shines through the book...he writes knowledgeably'

—— Literary Review

A top biography...This is great, grisly stuff and an education for anyone

—— Evening Standard

... This bright, engaging and breezy book ... suits the tenor of our times.

—— The Times

A remarkable feat of documentary detail and novelistic vividness...an unfolding literary event

—— New York Times Book Review

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father's story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity and succeeds in 'drawing us closer to the bleak heart of the Holocaust'

—— New York Times

A quiet triumph, moving and simple - impossible to describe accurately, and impossible to achieve in any medium but comics

—— Washington Post

All too infrequently, a book comes along that' s as daring as it is acclaimed. Art Spiegelman's Maus is just such a book

—— Esquire

A remarkable work, awesome in its conception and execution... at one and the same time a novel, a documentary, a memoir, and a comic book. Brilliant, just brilliant

—— Jules Feiffer

Maus is a masterpiece, and it's in the nature of such things to generate mysteries, and pose more questions than they answer. But if the notion of a canon means anything, Maus is there at the heart of it. Like all great stories, it tells us more about ourselves than we could ever suspect

—— Philip Pullman

Spiegelman's Maus changed comics forever. Comics now can be about anything

—— Alison Bechdel

Reading [his work] has been an amazing lesson in storytelling

—— Etgar Keret

It can be easy to forget how much of a game-changer Maus was.

—— Washington Post
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