Drawing on modern historical scholarship, rather than speculation, this book links the plays and poetry closely to the life of their author and sets the whole chronicle against the vivid tapestry backdrop of Shakespeare's world and time.

Born in 70 BC, in a small village near Mantua, Publius Vergilius Maro—Virgil—grew up to be hailed as the greatest Roman poet. And although his work has influenced Western literature for two millennia, little is known about the man himself. Who was the man who created the Aeneid—one of the most important poems in Western literature—and such universal phrases as “love conquers all” and “fortune favors the bold?” Peter Levi here reconstructs the poet's life, from a childhood largely shrouded in mystery to his work as a great literary genius and revolutionary poet, by examining archaeological and historical evidence from Augustan Rome, as well as through close readings of the poet's own work. “Virgil is an intensely personal poet, yet he is anonymous . . . My aim is not so ambitious as to try and restore his prestige single-handed. It has simply been to try to understand him in his original context.” In this highly acclaimed, nowclassic biography, Peter Levi discards the myths and brilliantly reveals the life of Virgil and the extraordinary times during which he lived.

This critical biography analyzes Tennyson's poetic development and his place in literature. It describes his influences, both classical and personal, and illuminates his working methods, for example: a constant revision of earlier material and an emphasis on oral rather than written poetry. Levi gives detailed textual criticism of some poems, but also shows acute psychological understanding of, for example, how Tennyson's famous friendship with Arthur Hallam affected his poetry over a long lifetime. Tennyson's relationships, often stormy but also affectionate, with other important figures of the Victorian era such as Gladstone, Carlyle and Queen Victoria herself, are vividly described, as are his attitudes towards other poets such as Wordsworth, whom he succeeded as Poet Laureate in 1850, and the same year that he married Emily Sellwood after an extraordinary 17-year engagement.

Of all the Roman poets, Horatius Flaccus (65 BC to 8 BC) is undoubtedly the greatest. His vast corpus of work (the Epodes, Satires, Odes, Epistles and the Ars Poetica) spanned all aspects of Roman life: politics, the arts, religion, and the authority of the emperor, while his poems about friendship, philosophy, love and sex still have considerable universal appeal. For two thousand years he has been kept alive by scholars who have felt a great affinity with the benign personality that emerges. But not since Fraenkel's life of Horace in 1957 has a substantial biography of the poet been undertaken. This book makes a real attempt to present a complete picture of the life of Horace and the world in which he lived. It considers the details of Horace's romantic liaisons and why he never married, what the status of his father - a freedman - meant to the poet, and his distinctive brand of philosophy.

Boris Pasternak