It is Swift’s considerable achievement sympathetically to examine an extraordinary, often troubling, tale...an enthralling narrative

An extraordinary book of real passionate research which keeps surprising and illuminating by turns.

Lively and searching… He has an engaging authorial presence and his own hesitations and uncertainties about Ezra Pound, both as poet and personality, lend a certain tension and a pleasing piquancy to his narrative

Swift is a sensitive and thoughtful reader of both poetry and human psychology... The Bughouse is also a kind of immersive adventure journalism, in which he retraces Pound's steps and tries to unearth new details about his life

To understand an artist as compromised by circumstances – and by his own many contradictions – as Ezra Pound, we have to trace a complex path through a maze of half-truths, myth, and simplification. The Bughouse does so with supreme care, critical acumen, and humanity, shedding a whole new light not only on Pound the man, but also on the shape and character of The Cantos, one of the most seriously flawed and truly brilliant artworks of the twentieth century

A wonderful portrait of Ezra Pound in all his moods - mad, bad and blindingly sane.

Swift does a fine job of allowing Pound’s many contradictions to stay in place and reminds us, too, that 45 years after his death there are plenty of contradictions left in the people who admire him

It is a tribute to the brightness of The Bughouse that Swift has revived my interest in the old monster

Swift’s strength is his refusal to separate Pound’s writings from the issues of Fascism and insanity... Sharp-eyed and pacey...it highlights memorably the tangled relations between lunatic, lover and poet

[A] remarkable study of [Ezra Pound’s] fertile afterlife

At the heart of this books lies a fascinating debate about poets and society

A powerful and very talented writer…dashing and arresting…the greatness in his subject shines through every dark corner

Swift admits that he cannot pin his elusive subject down, but there is no need. By following his instinct he has allowed the poet, with his ‘shifting self-narration’, to lead the way in this marvellous evocation.

American poet Ezra Pound… proves an elusive but fascinating subject in this non-linear, impressionistic biography

Isaiah Berlin is considered one of the letter-writers of the 20th century... those who give into temptation to flick through will be infinitely rewarded

Sparkles with brilliance and generosity

Meticulously edited and footnoted.

So readable... wonderfully vivid portraits of Powell's famous acquaintances

Richly and movingly enjoyable... a tapestry of Powell's contemporaries

Publisher's description. A biography of the comic writer Anthony Powell, author of the million-word masterpiece A Dance to the Music of Time, from renowned British biographer Hilary Spurling. An insightful and surprising look into what drove the writer widely regarded as the English Proust.

Elkin is a beguiling writer, and resolutely female, her sentences doing what Virginia Woolf wanted women's sentences to do, which is to "hold back the male flood"… Flâneuse is a riposte to all that macho stomping about… Flâneuse is so rich with shining trinkets and wise thoughts that not a single page disappoints or bores. It's that rare thing these days - a work of feminism which is enthused by literature and art and ideas rather than pop culture.

Elkin explores the history of people and places in astonishing detail. She writes with a passion and personality that creates the kind of familiarity which encourages us to believe that the women she studies were close friends of hers… Elkin's first person, colloquial yet witty style lets you into the recesses of her imagination and invites you to be her travel companion

Lauren Elkin is one of our most valuable critical thinkers – the Susan Sontag of her generation

The acclaimed historian of Russia sweeps the brittle high society of pre-Revolutionary St Petersburg, the terror-chilled jails of Stalin's purges and the secrets of 1990s Moscow archives into a tragic panorama.'

A seamlessly written and moving portrait of the soviet Union in miniature from the Revolution to the age of Yeltsin.

What is striking is how he has thrown himself heart and soul into the romance and emotion of his drama. The novel throbs with sex, maternal feeling, revolutionary fervour and terror ... Terrific stuff