PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Matthew Sturgis is the author of acclaimed biographies of Aubrey Beardsley and Walter Sickert, as well as Passionate Attitudes: The English Decadence of the 1890s. He has contributed to the TLS, Harpers & Queen and the Independent on Sunday. Matthew is on the editorial board of The Wildean, the journal of the Oscar Wilde society.
This page-turning life of Oscar Wilde is vivid and desperately moving. However much you think you know Wilde, this book will absorb and entertain you * Sunday Times * Wonderfully exciting... Sturgis's great achievement is to take on board his great flurry of contradictions' * Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday, 5* review * Matthew Sturgis uses new letters and a libel trial transcript to give a fuller picture of Oscar Wilde's dazzling rise and tragic fall... He is a tremendous orchestrator of material, fastidious, unhurried, indefatigable' * Observer * A perfectly diligent book, and tells new readers all they possibly need to know about Wilde and his world * The Times * Authoritative, magnificently researched * Spectator * Oscar Wilde is more fashionable than ever, and his demise still makes for a gripping read... Sturgis's account is fuller and in some ways more reliable [than Richard Ellmann's biography]... Sturgis's account of the hearing at the Old Bailey is as gripping as it is grim' * Guardian * [Sturgis's biography] is the first major attempt since that of Richard Ellman some 30 years ago, and it's much better... This is simply the best modern biography of Wilde... A terrific achievement' * Evening Standard * The Book of the Year, perhaps of the decade... Captures the wit, the love-ability, the dramatic genius, the insane self-destructiveness, the originality of Wilde... [Sturgis] is the greatest chronicler of the 1890s we have ever had' * TLS, Books of the Year * Astute in its judgements and offers a sharp and detailed grasp of the period and an appreciation of Wilde's ambiguities * Irish Times, Books of the Year, Colm Toibin * Like Churchill, Oscar Wilde [...] is one of those people who never seem to stop inspiring outstanding biographies, and Oscar: A Life by Matthew Sturgis is one of the best, as well as the latest, of a long line * Sunday Telegraph. * A first rate biography * Sunday Express, Books of the Year * This book provides not only a comprehensive record of [Wilde's] activities, friendships and financial affairs, but also a powerful sense of what it was actually like to know him... This is undoubtedly the most comprehensive, reliable and clear-sighted study of Wilde ever likely to be written' * Dublin Sunday Business Post * This excellent biography offers a deeper, more rounded picture of the writer's life, his rise to stardom, his fall and tragic final days... At once entertaining and scholarly. The man himself would be proud' * The Lady * Sturgis' attention to decadence allows readers to view Wilde's post-prison years in a new light... [An] insightful biography' * Volupte * Very solid and complete biography * The Dutch Review of Books * A great read * Edge Media Network *
