"Rich, generous and capacious....Its triumph is to show how the brilliant, abrasive, phenomenally direct voice of the Songs and Sonnets...deepens and darkens, cracking sometimes under the harsh strain of his middle years, only to re-emerge in the humane and powerful sermons of his last decade."—Hilary Spurling, Observer

"Highly readable...Stubbs manages to make Donne seem recognizable and sympathetic, and also the inhabitant of a world that has long since disappeared."—Andrew Motion, Guardian

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