Milton: A Biography: Volume I: The Life - Tapa dura

a work of brilliant scholarship - indispensable as much for the answers it provides as for the questions it raises, authoritative in the vast material ordered in its pages, and stimulating in its salutary challenge of accepted theories. Students of Milton and his age will for long argue the merits of Mr Parker's more controversial suggestions, but they could ill afford to bypass him on any aspect of the poet's life. (Review of English Studies)

Parker's life of Milton has long been accepted as one of the great literary biographies of the twentieth century, a unique accomplishment of scholarship based on a vast range of documentary evidence. Originally published in 1968, the biography was immediately acclaimed as `indispensable', `authoritative', as well as `controversial', and Parker himself was described in The Review of English Studies as `a living library and a walking museum'. Gordon Campbell's new and revised edition of Volume 1 forms a complete, self-contained, and wholly accessible account of Milton's life which remains essential reading for the student of seventeenth-century literature, and for anyone who share Parker's enthusiasm for Milton's poetry.