Review
A concise but detailed analysis of [Bacon's] whole range of thought.... This penetrating account of Bacon's work can be recommended as the best single-volume study available.
(
Brian Vickers The Times Literary Supplement )
[
Francis Bacon] will be useful to scholars for its ability to organize and explain a large and sometimes unwieldy topic ... and, because of its lucidity and clear-sightedness, it will be of interest to the general reader.
(
Charles Davis Boston Book Review )
A sensitive and sympathetic analysis.... There is always a suspicion, when one reads such a fine-lettered stylist as Bacon, that the prose is glittering with too many nice turns and rhetorical tricks. Zagorin's homage shows the substance to be reassuringly there behind it all.
(
Nigel Spivey Financial Times )
Zagorin ... brings a lifetime of learning, as well as personal enthusiasm, to his presentation of Bacon's intellectual accomplishments. This is a book not just to taste, but to chew and digest.
(
Washington Post )
[An] excellent new biography.
(
Roger Kimball The Wall Street Journal )
Eminently readable, expansive in scope, and scintillating. . . . [A] thoroughly researched, authoritative account.
(
Choice )
Review
This is a masterly book which brings together the two major Bacons--the politician and the philosopher. . . .Impeccably researched, elegantly written, and comprehensive in scope, it is simply the best synthetic study of Bacon now available.
(
Donald Kelley, Rutgers University )
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