Descriptions, Reviews, etc.
Description:
A kaleidoscopic investigation of Dickens's superhuman imagination.
Brief description:
Peter Conrad is a literary critic and cultural historian. His books include The Everyman History of English Literature; Creation: Artists, Gods & Origins; and Modern Times, Modern Places: Life and Art in the Twentieth Century.
Review Quotes:
"Dickensian is a language, not an adjective. Conrad speaks it fluently.
" --The Spectator World
"
If you have not read Dickens for a while - or ever - this reading of the novels will convert you. Reading Conrad, who for many years taught English literature at Oxford, makes you realise why so many of his hundreds of former pupils adore and praise him.
It is a marvellous study, the best book on Dickens since G.K. Chesterton's, which was published in 1906." --A. N. Wilson,
The Oldie "
Riveting...Conrad plunders Dickens's novels, essays, journalism and diaries for illuminating details that he artfully weaves together into something akin to a series of inventories." --
The Times "
Peter Conrad is a dancer and acrobat whose brilliance, audacity and courage forever defy our ungenerous hopes of a pratfall. Nobody else can do what he does and get away with it." --
Independent "
Conrad has published criticism so sharp you can cut your fingers on it." --
New York Observer "There is little Conrad doesn't notice, making his book seem less like a traditional critical account than the result of someone who has managed to get inside Dickens's head and have a good rummage...
Conrad's enthusiasm means that even readers who aren't quite sure where they are going are still likely to enjoy the journey." --
The Spectator "
Conrad is stunningly well informed, compulsively allusive and equipped with the kind of imagination that transforms the base metal of history into pure gold." --
Observer "
If Dickens was a unique enchanter, alert to the magic as well as the misery of this world, Conrad is a charmingly bewitched conjurer of his genius." --
The Critic "In his new book,
Peter Conrad draws on a lifetime's love of Dickens and an encyclopedic knowledge of his work to celebrate the novelist's magus power and the sheer fecundity of his imagination." --Claire Harman,
Literary Review "
An engrossing biography. Dickens the Enchanter is a treat. It offers a fresh understanding of his genius to new readers and is a highly rewarding reminder to devoted fans of Dickens of why he remains such a colossus of literature." --Martin Chilton,
Independent "
An erudite study... Sure to please Dickens's admirers." --
Publishers Weekly "
Exactly the kind of attention Dickens's writing demands and deserves, at once intimate and encyclopaedic. A compelling portrait of a writer who lived his work to the limit." --
David Trotter, Emeritus Professor of Literature, University of Cambridge "
An important account of an extraordinary writer who is often misread and misrepresented." --
Church Times "
[A] fluid account [in which the] titanic dynamism of Dickens [...] comes across most effectively." --
Wall Street Journal "
Reading this volume has a curiously dizzying effect. Conrad dazzles us with quotations illustrating his subject's dynamism, animism, anthropomorphism and scale of invention." --
Times Literary Supplement "
Marvellous" --
Sunday Times
