As I open Claire Tomalin's Thomas Hardy biography, I anticipate a good read. I'm an admirer of Tomalin's previous biographies (Jane Austen and Samuel Pepys, among them). I know the Penguin Press ...
On the menu of great literary lives, Thomas Hardy is a tough egg. Almost a century after his death, it’s hard to fully conjure, still less quite to comprehend, the spell his novels exerted over his ...