NEW BIOGRAPHY!

[Cath]

Some more reviews....

Spectator review:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/8684451/8684451/

Irish Times review (with a haunting picture of Keats's death mask):
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2012/1020/1224325490391.html

The Herald Scotland review:
http://www.heraldscotland.com/books-poetry/reviews/rock-star-romantic.19104310

NY Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/opinion/sunday/can-opium-or-illness-explain-a-keats-poem.html?_r=0

Hackney Gazette:
http://www.hackneygazette.co.uk/what-s-on/books/keats_as_a_drug_taker_and_fighter_1_1572795

John Carey's review in The Sunday Times (£):
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/culture/books/non_fiction/article1150558.ece

If anyone has access to the full ST review, please post it!

[Raphael]

Another review of Roe's new biography:

http://www.boloji.com/index.cfm?md=Content&sd=Articles&ArticleID=12955

Very good balanced review- debunks the ludicrous opium addict theory.

[Raphael]

Poor you, Cybele! Just remember: part of the pleasure is the thrill of anticipation .

~
There was another (typically sensationalist) article in the Daily Mail today about Keats and the Roe biography - this time about foetal alcohol syndrome:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2213930/Keats-doomed-mother-s-drinking-New-biography-claims-great-Romantic-poet-s-early-death-TB-foetal-alcohol-syndrome.html

A load of rubbish that claim- glad to see all the commentators thought so too and were greatly admiring of John's genius! Shame the comment submissions have ended- would have posted a comment!

[Raphael]

The Telegraph also ran an article yesterday by Roe on Keats's mercury use:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/9591165/Mercury-sent-John-Keats-to-an-early-grave.html

I agree that Mercury must have had a deletrious effect on him and perhaps caused his hair to thin but one big silly claim- that he took aloe vera as an emetic has never been stated historically and aloe vera is NOT an emetic!
I drink the gel daily- it is very good for you.

[Raphael]

The interview with Nicholas Roe on BBC Radio 3 last night can now be listened to online at the above link. It starts at 35:20 minutes into the programme and runs until 44:20 minutes.

Looks like one can still listen online- bookmarked it for later listening- thanks Cath.

[Cath]

No problem, Raphael!
----

There was a brief round-up in The Guardian yesterday on reviews of Roe's Keats biography:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/oct/26/critical-eye-book-reviews-roundup?INTCMP=SRCH

No such caveats punctuated reviews of Nicholas Roe's John Keats: A New Life, which Ferdinand Mount lauded in the Spectator for improving on earlier lives in "conveying the sense of Keats as a poet of the inner suburbs", a milieu the author "reconstructs beautifully". In the Literary Review, Seamus Perry remarked approvingly that, instead of being shown as a frail "aesthetic flower", Roe's Keats is "robust, feisty and individual, quick and streetwise". John Carey, in the Sunday Times, acclaimed the book as "a remarkable achievement, authoritative and imaginative to a degree that should make future biographers quail".

[Cath]

New interview with biographer Nicholas Roe (Yale Books):
http://yalebooks.wordpress.com/2012/10/29/author-interview-nicholas-roe-discusses-john-keats/

[Cath]

The first customer reviews of Roe's biography are appearing on Amazon (the second of which is by the author of a forthcoming biography of George Keats):

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/pdp/profile/A18Q36FN0YHGXL/ref=cm_cr_dp_pdp
http://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B00942HRCY/ref=cm_cr_dp_syn_footer?k=John%20Keats&showViewpoints=1

[Cath]

Daily Mail review of biography (4 stars):

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-2228702/Poignant-ode-true-immortal.html

[Ravenwing]

Adieu.

[Cybele]

I've had my copy of the Roe book for a couple of weeks now.
I was disappointed to discover that the print in the book was just too small for me to read comfortably. I ended up also downloading a digital copy to my Kindle. (I hope Mr. Roe appreciates my buying the book *twice*! Fortunately, reading footnotes in an e-book is very easy and I'm a compulsive footnote reader.)
I'm about a quarter of the way through it, and am taking my good old time reading it since new Keats books are a rare pleasure.
Because I haven't read the whole thing, I can't offer my opinion on it yet.
But -- Yay! I'm enjoying myself!

[Saturn]

After buying it in late September, for one reason or another I've only got around to coming to near the end of it now. The description of the journey to Italy is the most vivid, detailed, and heartbreaking of all the biographies I've read. You really get a sense of what it must have been like for Keats and Severn in that long drawn out march to death.

Anyone that is sceptical of this biography or fearful of a scandalous libel on the name of Keats or some outrageous claims which denigrate the poet fear not; this book is a true tribute and a full and insightful, very informative and sympathetic one at that.

[Cath]

Another review, this time from Publishers Weekly:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-300-12465-1

And another review from the Spectator site - "The joke has been made by Jack Stillinger, an American editor of Keats, that there have been so many treatments of the poet’s life that we know him better than his contemporaries did...":

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/books/2012/11/john-keats-by-nicholas-roe-review/

[Cybele]

I'm enjoying the book so far and I'm impressed by the details of Keats's early life -- so often these details have not been presented in other biographies. (Maybe that's because it's so often very difficult to research anyone's early life.)

I have to quibble with part of the author's description of Fanny Keats as having a darker complexion. John spoke of Fanny K. as resembling their brother, Tom, who in the drawing by J. Severn, looks to have had blond hair. (Fanny apparently had asked her big brother, John, if she had a Spanish face. He told her that no, her face was "English all over." Also, John later wrote in a letter that "Fanny walks in my imagination like a ghost. She is so like Tom." )

Blonde or brunette, what relevance does Fanny Keats's hair color have regarding her brother's poetry? Umm. That would be absolutely none! (I am merely obsessive. I seem also to be in a mood to pick nits.)

[Cath]

Also the California Literary Review on Roe's new biography...:

http://calitreview.com/32263?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CaliforniaLiteraryReviewBooks+%28California+Literary+Review+%C2%BB+Books%29