Kirjahaku

First published in 1929, The Stricken Deer was the winner of that year's James Tait Black Memorial Prize and also the Hawthornden Prize: it was David Cecil's first book.For a time, towards the end of the eighteenth-century, William Cowper was the foremost poet in England. But David Cecil's biography doesn't celebrate a life of success, rather, in Cowper's own words, 'the strange and uncommon incidents of my life.' Cowper suffered from severe bouts of depression. His personal tragedy however enriched English literature: the fear of madness made him turn to writing poetry as a form of mental discipline, and isolation for the great world and from his own kind helped him to become the most enchanting of letter-writers. 'This is a sympathetic and vivid biography; it is subtle with a kind of gentle acuteness and vivid without literary ostentation. It is the work of a biographer with a clear head and a clever heart ... the rarest of all merits is the sensitive fairness of the of the biographer's estimate of character and situation throughout.' Desmond MacCarthy, Sunday Times

An eminent literary biographer and critic shows how poetry enriched the art of two representative English Romantic paintersIn Visionary and Dreamer, David Cecil evokes the century of the poet-painter, when painting drew much of its inspiration from imaginative literature. Samuel Palmer (1805–1881), an unworldly visionary, obscure in his lifetime but now a recognized master, and Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898), the Pre-Raphaelite daydreamer, once revered as a great painter but later admired chiefly for his work in applied art, emerge as artists who turned to their own inner lives to interpret Shakespeare, Milton, and Keats.

Originally published in 1935, this volume contains the text of the Leslie Stephen Lecture for that year, delivered by Lord David Cecil at the University of Cambridge. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Jane Austen's life, career and characters.

Modern Library’s 100th best non-fiction book of all time, and John F. Kennedy’s favourite book.A masterful biography of the life of Lord Melbourne – Queen Victoria’s Prime Minister and devoted mentor, and one of England’s most controversial statesmen – whose turbulent marriage to Lady Caroline Lamb was one of the greatest scandals of the era. A charming, curious and altogether idiosyncratic figure, Melbourne is the perfect subject for a biography and David Cecil – with his elegant, thoughtful style and perfect scholarship – was his ideal biographer. The resulting work is a true classic of the genre and remains the most important and comprehensive account of Britain’s most beguiling and individual Prime Minister.This volume contains the entirety of David Cecil's two seminal biographies of Lord Melbourne - The Young Melbourne and Lord M - in one definitive book. “A superb work of art” – Harold Nicholson“A historian of the heart” – L. P. Hartley