- Published: 30 June 2013
- ISBN: 9781448189618
- Imprint: Vintage Digital
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 640
Flaubert
A Life
- Published: 30 June 2013
- ISBN: 9781448189618
- Imprint: Vintage Digital
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 640
Magnificent... Brown's biography will clearly be the Life for this generation
James Wood, Scotsman
Frederick Brown, as might be expected of the biographer of Zola, is at his strongest when dealing with the social and political background to Flaubert's life...This is the biography which will best help us to understand Flaubert's reactions to the ceaseless political turmoil of his life
Julian Barnes, New York Review of Books
Very rewarding... few men have been more truly extraordinary than Flaubert, to whom Brown takes us as close as it is possible to be other than in the flesh... The best biographies are fine books, and this is one of the very best. It leaves the reader with a whole world to think about and an enlivened mind with which to do the thinking
Literary Review
Wonderfully rich and enjoyable
Sunday Telegraph
Brown's book will win Flaubert many new or returning readers... Funny, racy, gossipy and erudite by turns.
Daily Telegraph
This massive and authoritative biography... There is...something aptly Flaubertian about Brown's approach... an abundance of larger-than-life detail
Andrew Crumey, Scotland on Sunday
Sympathetic, well-informed, but never intrusive...Flaubert is a superb biography, not least because it gives us the portrait of a man embedded in his country and his age even as he rebels against its values and mores. Brown is masterly at drawing the background to his subject, social and political, writing with authority and an eye for the telling detail that compel fascination as well as respect.
Caroline Moore, Spectator
In Frederick Brown's capacious, compelling new biography, the immense paradoxes of Flaubert's life and his working methods are brilliantly rendered... This is a brilliant read - and one which wears its sizeable erudition lightly; which finds dramatic tension and emotional scope in the interior life (and pernickety working methods) of a frequently closed-off man, while also presenting us with a great panoramic portrait of the shifting political and social currents of the France he inhabited.
Douglas Kennedy, The Times