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Tom Stoppard: A Life
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Critics' Rating Index
78/99
Readers' Rating Index
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Scholars' Citation Index
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Volume of Reviews
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About This Book
Tom Stoppard is a towering and beloved literary figure. Known for his dizzying narrative inventiveness and intense attention to language, he deftly deploys art, science, history, politics, and philosophy in works that span a remarkable spectrum of literary genres: theater, radio, film, TV, journalism, and fiction. His most acclaimed creations--Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Shakespeare in Love--remain as fresh and moving today as when they dazzled their first audiences. Stoppard's life, too, is fascinating: born in Czechoslovakia, he escaped the Nazis with his mother and spent his early years in Singapore and India before arriving in England at age eight. Skipping university, he embarked on a brilliant career, becoming close friends over the years with an astonishing array of writers, actors, directors, musicians, and political figures, from Peter O'Toole, Harold Pinter, and Stephen Spielberg to Mick Jagger and Vaclav Havel. Having long described himself as a "bounced Czech," Stoppard was surprised to learn late in life of his Jewish family and the relatives he lost to the Holocaust, secrets his mother had kept from him. Hermione Lee's in-depth analysis seamlessly weaves Stoppard's life and work together into a vivid, insightful, and always riveting portrait of a remarkable man.
Reviews
"Missing is an in-depth account of Stoppard's inner struggles ..."
"Of course, in many ways the task of the biographer has been unlike that of the playwright as she searches for an almost therapeutic continuity in the factual life of someone notorious in his own narratives for jaw-dropping jolts ..."
"Lee is no real intruder."
"And the writing could do with a bit more zest and brio."
"[a] thorough, sympathetic, and eminently readable text ..."
"Lee offers no adverse criticism of his work, but quotes plentifully from those who do."
"we get glimpses of the possibilities of a life in art, and its limits ..."
"Lee gives wise, learned readings to each major play (and a number of minor ones), teasing apart their themes, interpreting their theatrical gestures, and placing them cleverly in the context of their author's life and work."
"Lee...builds an ever richer, circular understanding of his abiding themes and concerns, of his personal and artistic life, and of his many other passionate engagements ..."
"Her attentive exposition of the themes and intricate plot of Arcadia is almost worth the price of admission by itself; Stoppard has often been criticised for being 'heartless' or too purely 'cerebral', but it is one of Lee's several literary-critical triumphs to identify the emotions that drive so much of his work[.]"
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