David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet - Tapa dura

"A gorgeous addition to the growing interest in David Jones, lavishly illustrated with his dreamy engravings and watercolours... Dilworth’s meticulous, richly detailed biography is the perfect introduction to a notoriously difficult poet and a painter with a lightness of touch to stand beside Marc Chagall and Raoul Dufy." (Claire Lowdon Sunday Times, 2017 Books of the Year)

"Pretty well the perfect biography. It does justice to an artist who has been quite unaccountably overlooked by posterity; perhaps being a genius in several modes – painting, engraving, poetry – confuses critics... A wonderful life." (Melanie McDonagh Evening Standard, Books of the Year)

"It is lavishly illustrated and wonderfully well written." (Observer, 2017 Books of the Year)

"Thomas Dilworth, the leading scholar of Jones’s work, has already devoted several books to re-establishing his genius. Now, David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet – a biography 30 years in the making – offers the fullest portrait we are ever likely to have. Thanks to Dilworth’s fastidious attention to detail (a quality he shares with his subject), it is an enormously absorbing read, full of the curious life of the imagination and the colour-tinting of anecdote." (Jeremy Noel-Tod Daily Telegraph)

"This biography is a landmark. It would be good if it stirred an interest not only in Jones as an artist and poet, but in the questions he faced about modernity: what happens to art in a culture where each thing is no more than itself, or its market price?" (Rowan Williams New Statesman)

"This first full biography is most welcome... Dilworth’s narrative sympathetically illuminates the workings of a troubled, original mind, its interplay with mid-20th century English intellectual life, and its continuing resonance... Dilworth’s portrayal of a man for whom every object evoked meaning, usually anxiety, is affecting, sometimes comic... A mostly inner life... whose turbulence Dilworth describes with sensitive nuance." (Jackie Wullschlager Financial Times)

"Thomas Dilworth is the leading Jones scholar... Beautifully produced and sumptuously illustrated, this admiring biography eclipses in its thoroughness, previous accounts of Jones’s life, and its accumulation of detail, ranging from the make of Jones’s underpants (Jaeger) to the precise dimensions of rooms he lodged in, is unlikely to be surpassed." (John Carey The Sunday Times)

"A major biography... Dilworth is a brilliant describer and analyst of the art; his descriptions would make individual works vivid to the reader even if they weren’t reproduced in this richly illustrated book." (Chris Power Guardian)

"Thomas Dilworth’s biography is the work of a lifetime. It has been worth waiting for... Once bitten by the Jones enthusiasm, the reader will find everything of interest. No detail is too trivial... Apart from his great skill in expounding the poetry, and his intuitive knowledge and love of the visual art, Dilworth is memorably intelligent and sensitive in describing Jones’s many intense and emotional relationships with women... [A] wonderful book." (A. N. Wilson Spectator)

"This sense of a man unmoored in time is richly explored by Thomas Dilworth in his new biography... He is an expert teaser of meaning from Jones’s elusive, allusive art... There was something other-worldly about Jones and Dilworth draws out his oddness and visionary intelligence in this moving biography." (Laura Freeman Standpoint)

Thomas Dilworth is the pre-eminent reader and interpreter of the work of David Jones and has published extensively on the subject. His books include The Shape of Meaning in the Poetry of David Jones, Reading David Jones and David Jones in the Great War. He is the editor of Jones’s illustrated Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Jones’s Wedding Poems and Inner Necessities, the Letters of David Jones to Desmond Chute.