Patrick O'Brian

Tolstoy's book is not the horror Patrick might have feared. Neither hagiography nor hatchet job, it is a balanced, revealing, critical yet sympathetic account. Furthermore, it lives up to its subtitle.

The Spectator

one of the most gripping literary biographies of recent years

Sunday Times

Tolstoy corrects errors of fact and representation and paints a much fuller picture

Sunday Telegraph

Reading Tolstoy is like reading a fine, detailed detective story; the meticulousness of his research is wholly admirable. But what is most striking is the delicate skill with which he parallels O' Brian's self and experiences, daring persuasively to link imagined events and characters to the realities of the world that the writer inhabited.... This first volume of Tolstoy's biography is brilliantly invasive, and to be treasured because it exposes and rebuts much falseness that has been written about O' Brian.

The Times

Don't be daunted by detail: Tolstoy writes with that passion to understand that characterises the best biographies.

Books of the Year, The Spectator

Compelling

Financial Times

solidly written, painstaking and competent. Admirers of O' Brian's work will regard it as required reading.

Guardian

Tolstoy has not written a hatchet job; his book seems truthful and psychologically insightful, showing that to understand all is not to forgive all.

Literary Review