Like most biographies nowadays, David Nokes's John Gay is very long, but unlike some of the others it is not much longer than it needed to be. Gay devoted so much of his attention to people grander than himself that his life story can't be told without allusion to those of more complicated and ambitious figures like Pope, Swift and Addison. They in turn were involved in all manner of ways with even mightier men, especially politicians - for example, Oxford and Bolingbroke on one side and the powerful, unscrupulous Walpole on the other. And then there were the great lords and ladies who took or pretended to take an interest in writers and writing. So even the relatively peripheral movements of a self-consciously minor figure like Gay require for their useful exposition a lot of information about his betters.

LRB 11 May 1995 | PDF Download