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Jonathan Swift´s famous works -from GULLIVERS TRAVELS to A MODEST PROPOSAL- are unparalleled in their piercing critique of modern society. But Swift was a man of great contradictions: a man who mocked men´s vanity but held himself in high esteem, a religious moralizer famed for his malice. John Stubbs paints a vivid portrait of an extraordinary man and a turbulent period of English history.

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Jonathan Swift was a man of contradictions: a man who satirized the powerful but aspired to political greatness, who mocked men´s vanity but held himself in high esteem, a religious moralizer famed for his malice - a man sharply aware of humanity´s flaws, but no less susceptible to them.

As with his acclaimed biography of John Donne, John Stubbs paints a vivid portrait of an extraordinary man and a turbulent period of English and Irish history.

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Stubbs succeeds in offering something delicate, subtle and new. ... In [this] fine and sensitive book, Stubbs restores Swift´s writing to its rich religious and cultural contexts without diminishing its autonomy Ruth Scurr Financial Times

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John Stubbs was born in 1977 and studied English at Oxford and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge where he completed a doctorate in 2005. Donne: The Reformed Soul was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. Reprobates was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.

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