Professor Dame Hermione Lee Tom Stoppard

Annotation

The key book for all time on Tom Stoppard: the biography of one of our greatest playwrights, by one of the leading literary biographers in the English-speaking world. With unprecedented access to private papers, diaries, letters, and countless interviews with figures ranging from Felicity Kendal to John Boorman and Trevor Nunn to Steven Spielberg, Hermione Lee builds a meticulously researched portrait of one of our greatest playwrights. Drawing on several years of long, exploratory conversations with Stoppard himself, it tracks his Czech origins and childhood in India to every school and home he ever lived in, every piece of writing he ever did, and every play and film he ever worked on; but in the end this is the story of a complex, elusive and private man, which tells you an enormous amount about him but leaves you, also, with the fascinating mystery of his ultimate unknowability.