RaveThe New York Review of BooksLandon’s story now takes on elements of a psychological thriller, as well as an unsettling resonance in these days of Me Too. Miller is a brilliant explicator of the troubled trail of fact and fiction that biography leaves in its wake ... This long, fraught entanglement with her subject gives Miller’s biography its intricate fascination. It is scholarly, passionate, and angry ... produces a devastating picture of the competitive subculture of literary London in the 1820s and 1830s ... thanks to Lucasta Miller’s fierce and enthralling book, a complex kind of justice has been rendered to L.E.L. for the first time.
Frances Wilson
RaveThe New York Review of Books[Wilson] sees the need for stylistic fireworks as well as steady scholarship to illuminate his life. She writes with speed, flamboyance, and constant changes of viewpoint and perspective, offset by moments of calm, shrewd analysis ... she brilliantly exploits the themes of impending violence, murderous hatred, and suspended terror in so much of De Quincey’s later work ... It is particularly for [the] daring passages that one admires this risky, sprightly, passionate biography, which goes further than anything previously in catching the strange, elusive Opium Eater, and which could never for a moment be mistaken for a blue commemorative plaque.
