A unique portrait of a great playwright by one of our leadin literary biographers.

With unprecedented access to private papers, diaries, letters, and countless interviews with figures ranging from Felicity Kendal to John Boorman and Trevor Nunn to Steven Spielberg, Hermione Lee builds a metiucously researched portrait of one of our greatest playwrights.

Drawing on several years of long, exploratory conversations with Stoppard himself, it tracks his Czech origins and childhood in India to every school and home he's ever lived in, every piece of writing he's ever done, and every play and film he's ever worked on; but in the end this is the story of a complex, elusive and private man, which tells you an enormous amount about him but leaves you, also, with the fascinating mystery of his ultimate unknowability.

A unique portrait of a great playwright by one of our leadin literary biographers.

About the Author

Hermione Lee is a British biographer, literary critic, and academic. She was President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the English Faculty at Oxford University. Her work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006) and Penelope Fitzgerald (2013, winner of the 2014 James Tait Black Prize for Biography and one of the New York Times' best 10 books of 2014).

She has also written books on Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Roth and Willa Cather, an introduction to biography, and a collection of essays on life-writing, Body Parts. She was awarded the Biographers' Club Prize for Exceptional Contribution to Biography in 2018. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2003 she was made a CBE, and in 2013 she was made a Dame for services to literary scholarship.

Book Information
ISBN 9780571314430
Author Professor Dame Hermione Lee
Format Hardback
Page Count 992
Imprint Faber & Faber
Publisher Faber & Faber
Weight(grams) 1330g
Dimensions(mm) 242mm * 166mm * 45mm