Peter Conrad

A kaleidoscopic investigation of Dickens’s imagination and the world he created. See Dickens as never before in this creative biography, which delves into his novels, journalistic essays and letters to reveal his strange, hilarious but obsessive personal character and the audacity of a mind that set out, as he said, to rearrange the universe. Peter Conrad’s bold rediscovery of Dickens...

Despite our culture's proclaimed respect for scientific reason, we live in a society that is no less bedazzled—and bedevilled—by myth than those of our remote ancestors. Roland Barthes first examined the mythical resonances of consumer products in the 1950s. Far from being demystified, consumerism has since morphed into a universal religion, its compulsory ritual of shopping essential to our economic...

Dickensian is a language, not an adjective. Conrad speaks it fluently. -- Spectator World Marvellous... the best book on Dickens since G.K. Chesterton’s. -- A. N. Wilson, The Oldie A kaleidoscopic investigation of Dickens’s imagination and the world he created. See Dickens as never before in this creative biography, which delves into his novels, journalistic essays and letters to reveal...