Michael Wood writes:

But Richardson’s patience and his unwillingness to be rattled by the trouble he runs into pay off handsomely. James earns Richardson’s devotion – something I suspect Richardson’s earlier subjects, Thoreau and Emerson, didn’t have to work quite so hard at – and we come close to James, precisely because Richardson gives our doubts a chance, gets us wondering how great the great man is. James’s health was always shaky, for example (bad eyes, bad back, poor digestion, insomnia), but he kept climbing mountains and was, Richardson nicely says, ‘an accomplished complainer’. He made the most of things in both senses: went on about them and turned them into insight and success. Richardson can rise to real eloquence, asserting that James ‘had a strange and ultimately unfathomable ability to bring bits and pieces of order and achievement – trophies dripping from the deep – out of disorder and chaos’. And there are appealing moments when he simply gives in to James’s charm and energy.

(LRB 20 September 2007)

Marion Boyars | paperback 622 pp. |ISBN: 9780618433254