Ben Jonson
A Life
Ian Donaldson
Reviews and Awards
SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK BIOGRAPHY AWARD 2012
"It was a brilliant, epoch making, and memorable life superbly served by Ian Donaldson. Jonson earned his fame. This is and will remain the biography to have." - Ralph Berry, Contemporary Review
"A rare and valuable achievement. Elegant in style, flexible in approach, and characterised by a tone of intelligent curiosity, it is engaging as well as definitive." - Lisa Gorton, Australian Book Review
"Deeply researched but happily readable." - New York Review of Books
"absorbing biography" - New Statesman
"fascinating portrait...brilliant biography" - Daily Telegraph
"authoritative and lucid biography" - Sunday Telegraph
"definitive biography of this quarrelsome playwright." - Sunday Times
"The biographical material on Jonson is extraordinarily rich...Donaldson's fine book is stocked with new material" - The Guardian
"exemplary new biography...rich in detail and insights" - The Guardian
"a work of clarity and lucidity, exact in its historical detail, full of new material and ingeniously suggestive in its conjecture and interpretation." - Sam Leith, Spectator
"Donaldson is ideally placed to write the definitive life, and he has done so." - John Carey, Sunday Times
"Ian Donaldson has written a splendid life of this extraordinary man, which all claimants to the "tribe of Ben" will savor and prize." - The Weekly Standard
"A learned biography, it cuts a revealing section through the Jacobean Age." - Michael Alexander, The Tablet
"His deep involvement with Jonson scholarship and criticism ... is apparent on every page of his authoritative, elegantly written, and illuminatingly illustrated biography." - Stanley Wells, New York Review of Books
"...one of the best literary biographies written in any era." - R.S White, Parergon.