Tormented Hope

Oct 6, 2024 4:36 PM

Author:Brian Dillon

Tormented Hope

'It's so good that, after reading it, I needed a lie-down' - Hilary Mantel, Guardian Books of the Year

Brian Dillon looks at nine prominent hypochondriacs - James Boswell, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Daniel Paul Schreber, Alice James, Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould and Andy Warhol - and what their lives tell us about the way the mind works with, and against, the body. His findings are stimulating and surprising, and the stories he tells are often moving, sometimes hilarious, and always gripping. With a new afterword on Michael Jackson.

Brian Dillon's first book, In the Dark Room, won the Irish Book Award for Non-fiction in 2006. He lives in Canterbury.

Reviews

It's so good that, after reading it, I needed a lie-down.

—— Hilary Mantel , Guardian Books of the Year

A brilliant series of portraits

—— Observer

Fascinating ... Written with great elegance and shrewd understanding

—— William Boyd , Guardian Books of the Year

Illuminating, humane and beautiful

—— Independent

Ingenious and intriguing

—— Guardian

Brian Dillon is a superbly careful writer. ... [This book] will delight, move and horrify any of the millions of us who, like the late Spike Milligan, have at one time or another contemplated having "I told you I was ill" inscribed on our gravestones.

—— Sam Leith , Daily Mail

A mini-masterpiece

—— Louise Carpenter , Observer

Excellent

—— Sunday Times

Strangely delightful ... Dillon's book is constantly intelligent

—— Scotland on Sunday

You don't need to be a hypochondriac to enjoy this series of discursive, insightful essays that are full of quirky details and fascinating anecdotes

—— Mail on Sunday

Illuminating

—— Philip Hoare , Sunday Telegraph

Eloquent and incisive

—— Boyd Tonkin , Independent

Dillon's mind is as interesting as those of the people he writes about ... bizarrely unputdownable

—— Eileen Battersby , Irish Times

Glinting like a tray of instruments, her prose is satisfyingly precise

—— Victoria Segal , The Guardian

A curiously thrilling read, written with an elegance heightened by its clarity and economy

—— Elizabeth Day , Observer

A valuable and unflinching account, since it so clearly tells the truth

—— Christopher Hart , The Sunday Times

This book is mesmerising

—— William Leith , Scotsman

Her description of the struggle to remain individual and hence moral is her real achievement. This, to me, is what female writing has to do, and she does it with style and humour and beauty

—— Rachel Cusk

Richard Dawkin's new book... gives the fact-rejecters their just deserts

—— Daily Telegraph

The book is full of evidence, some familiar and some new. Its case is presented in a manner succinct, clear and sometimes vivid

—— Daily Telegraph

No other book currently available approaches Dawkin's comprehensive yet accessible treatment of the extraordinarily diverse and massive body of data that drives ineluctably to the same conclusion

—— National Center for Science Education

The Greatest Show on Earth is a lucid, thorough and often exciting survey of evolution and takes in rats' teeth, dogs, bacteria, the so-called missing link, crustaceans, giraffe anatomy, hummingbirds, chimpanzees, enzymes - you name it. It is informed in nearly every paragraph by Mr. Dawkins's irrepressible enthusiasm

—— Sarah Lyall , New York Times

The Greatest Show on Earth... is essential reading. I would currently rate it... as the best overall book on the evidence for Evolution

—— Marc E. Miquel , SCOPE

This is a magnificent book of wonderstanding: Richard Dawkins combines an artist's wonder at the virtuosity of nature with a scientist's understanding of how it comes to be

—— Matt Ridley, author of "Nature via Nurture"

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