Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne - Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2022

Product Information

From his earlier days, when excited by the nakedness of his body, till later in life, when he feared the nakedness of his soul, Donne’s life was as inspirited by love, language, sex, and God as much as it was complicated by ambition, illness, money problems, and the death of six of his children. It is necessary to shake language until it will express our own distinctive hesitations, peculiarities, our own uncertain and never-quite-successful yearning towards beauty.

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (Audio Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (Audio

The announcement was streamed to readers around the world via the Baillie Gifford Prize social media channels. I defy anyone to read her descriptions (“he wore a hat big enough to sail a cat in”) or her summaries (“Tap a human, he believed, and they ring with the sound of infinity”) and not be wanting more. For Rundell, Donne is writing into being a new ideal: a “completed meshing of body and imagination”. As he later wrote of his relationship with God: “I, like an usurped town, to another due/ Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end.Rundell's fifth novel, The Good Thieves, tells the story of a girl named Vita who travels from England to New York with her mother to look after her grieving grandfather.

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne - Winner of

Yancey came across these 23 meditations — written in 1623, during a bubonic plague epidemic in London — as he tried to think his way through Covid-19. He was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, a priest, a member of Parliament—and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. John Donne’s mother almost certainly did not, in truth, carry Thomas More’s head in her accoutrements: Margaret Roper had it until she died in 1544, when she left it to her husband, who was buried with it: it’s unlikely that he would have loaned it out like a library book. Katherine Rundell is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, where she works on Renaissance literature. In his Paradoxes, Donne pushed arguments to often ludicrous limits, comparing women to “fleas sucking our very blood”.Rundell, at one point, says: “The human soul is so ruthlessly original; the only way to express the distinctive pitch of one’s own heart is for each of us to build our own way of using our voice. The challenge for any biographer is to delve into the apparent contradictions between the two Donnes, the piratical Jack who sailed with Raleigh to Cadiz and who wrote brilliant sonnets, rich in witty paradox and bold sexual assertion, and the prelate Dr John, who eventually became dean of St Paul’s; an accomplishment, Rundell tells us, that owed as much to his networking skills as it did to his considerable ability at preaching. Donne’s father, also John Donne, was an ironmonger, though not of the horny-handed, rugged variety; he was warden of the Ironmongers’ Company. There was a great concourse of noblemen and gentlemen’, and in among ‘the extreme press and thronging’, as they pushed closer to hear his words, men in the crowd were shoved to the ground and trampled.