From the Garden of Eden to Gethsemane, from the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to the pleasure gardens of Versailles, from the Zen gardens of Kyoto to the landscapes of Capability Brown and New York's High Line, the garden has always been far more than somewhere to grow things.It is where humanity has worked out its relationship with the natural world — the place where culture, spirituality and nature converge. An inspiration for poets, painters and philosopher...

From the Garden of Eden to Gethsemane, from the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to the pleasure gardens of Versailles, from the Zen gardens of Kyoto to the landscapes of Capability Brown and New York's High Line, the garden has always been far more than somewhere to grow things.It is where humanity has worked out its relationship with the natural world — the place where culture, spirituality and nature converge. An inspiration for poets, painters and philosopher...

‘What distinguished Clare is an unspectacular joy and a love for the inexorable one-thing-after-anotherness of the world’ Seamus HeaneyJohn Clare (1793-1864) was a great Romantic poet, with a name to rival that of Blake, Byron, Wordsworth or Shelley – and a life to match. The ‘poet’s poet’, he has a place in the national pantheon and, more tangibly, a plaque in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner, unveiled in 1989.Here at last is Clare’s full story, from his ...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE‘Gripping and at times ineffably sad, this book would be poetic even without the poetry. It will be the standard biography of Ted Hughes for a long time to come’ Sunday Times‘Seldom has the life of a writer rattled along with such furious activity … A moving, fascinating biography’ The TimesTed Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He is one of Britain’s most important poets, a p...

How did plague turn Shakespeare from a jobbing hack into a courtly poet? How did Bottom's dream rewrite the Bible? How did Shakespeare's plays lead to the deaths of an earl and a king? And why was he the one dramatist of his generation never to be imprisoned?Weaving a dazzling tapestry of Elizabethan beliefs and obsessions, private passions and political intrigues, Soul of the Age leads us on an exhilarating tour of the extraordinary, colourful and often violent world that...

With an introduction by Simon CallowJudgements about the quality of works of art begin in opinion. But for the last two hundred years only the wilfully perverse (and Tolstoy) have denied the validity of the opinion that Shakespeare was a genius.Who was Shakespeare? Why has his writing endured? And what makes it so endlessly adaptable to different times and cultures? Exploring Shakespeare's life, including questions of authorship and autobiography, ...

The most important critical work for decades' Bryan Appleyard, Sunday TimesIn the brilliantly engaging style that characterised The Genius of Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate has written a series of compelling pieces on the link between literature and the environment and why poetry matters in the new millennium. In fascinating detail, Bate explains how words like 'culture' and 'environment' have evolved since the writing of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and the Romantics to...

A Times and Sunday Times Best Book of 2020‘Radical Wordsworth deserves to take its place as the finest modern introduction to his work, life and impact’ Financial Times‘Richly repays reading … It is hard to think of another poet who has changed our world so much’ Sunday TimesA dazzling new biography of Wordsworth’s radical life as a thinker and poetical innovator, published to mark the 250th anniversary of h...

A dazzling biography of two interwoven, tragic lives: John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald.‘Highly engaging … Go now, read this book’ THE TIMES‘For awhile after you quit Keats,’ Fitzgerald once wrote, ‘All other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.’John Keats died two hundred years ago, in February 1821. F. Scott Fitzgerald defined a decade that began one hundred years ago, the Jazz Age.In this biography, prizewinning author ...

‘Enlightening, moving’ SIR IAN MCKELLENFrom the acclaimed and bestselling biographer Jonathan Bate, a luminous new exploration of Shakespeare and how his themes can untangle comedy and tragedy, learning and loving in our modern lives.‘The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.’How does one survive the death of a loved one, the mess of war, the experience of being schooled, of falling in love, of growing old, of losing ...

Sweeping across two millennia and every literary genre, acclaimed scholar and biographer Jonathan Bate provides a dazzling introduction to English Literature. The focus is wide, shifting from the birth of the novel and the brilliance of English comedy to the deep Englishness of landscape poetry and the ethnic diversity of Britain's Nobel literature laureates. It goes on to provide a more in-depth analysis, with close readings from an extraordinary scene in King Lear to a war poem by Carol ...

From one of our most eminent and accessible literary critics, a groundbreaking account of how the Greek and Roman classics forged Shakespeare’s imaginationBen Jonson famously accused Shakespeare of having “small Latin and less Greek.” But he was exaggerating. Shakespeare was steeped in the classics. Shaped by his grammar school education in Roman literature, history, and rhetoric, he moved to London, a city that modeled itself on ancient Rome. He worked in a theatr...