Super-Infinite

A Sunday Times top ten bestseller
Shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award 2023
Shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize for Non-Fiction 2023
Shortlisted for the Slightly Foxed First Biography Prize 2023

'Masterly.' Observer
'Wonderful, joyous.' Maggie O'Farrell
'Frankly brilliant.' Sunday Times
'Unmissable.' Simon Jenkins
'Every page sparkles.' Claire Tomalin
'A triumph.' Matt Haig
'Stylish, scholarly and gripping.' Rose Tremain

John Donne lived myriad lives. Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, Donne was incapable of being just one thing.

He was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, an MP, a priest, the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral - and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language.

In Super-Infinite, Katherine Rundell shows us the many sides of Donne's extraordinary life, his obsessions, his blazing words, and his tempestuous Elizabethan times - unveiling Donne as the most remarkable mind and as a lesson in living.

Auteur

Katherine Rundell

Texte du rabat

John Donne led myriad lives. He was a lawyer, a sea adventurer, a preacher, an MP, and a poet. Along the way he converted from Catholicism to Protestantism. He was also imprisoned for marrying a 16-year old girl without her father's consent; struggled to feed a family of twelve children; and was often ill and in pain. He was a man who suffered from black surges of misery yet expressed in his verse many breathtaking impressions of electric joy and love.

In a biography that marks the arrival of a huge non-fiction talent, Katherine Rundell uses a witty and spirited entry point, an 'act of evangelism' to unveil the man behind the words. Donne preached sermons that drew vast crowds; this was a man with a rhetorical power to which in response people would push forward as if at a football match: at one reading, two people were nearly crushed to death. He knew how to harness language into something new.

Fleet-footed in style and deep-rooted in scholarly insight, Superinifinite is the portrait of John Donne that we need; a vivid excavation into his extraordinary life, his obsessions, his times, his work; and what his unique life can tell us about our lives now.