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Review(s) from previous edition
"Max Saunders knows more about Ford Madox Ford than any other living person. He also understands him better than anyone else. His scrupulous and passionate biography will never be superseded.
- Julian Barnes
"One is grateful for Saunders's scrupulously thorough, well-written and conscientious biography. Scholarship is always a good thing." - John Sutherland, The Sunday Times
"fascinating story ... a subtle and lucid biographer ... the book is a must; it is certainly the best biography so far ... a first-rate work of reference, indispensable whenever we want to know what Arnold Bennett said to John Galsworthy on a bus in 1913" - Peter Washington, The Standard
"It contains a good deal more literary criticism than previous biographies of Ford, and its literary awareness is much more shaped by radical critical theories ... Ford is a very variable sort of writer; it's a sign of how good he can be - and how useful this new biography is going to prove - that at his best he still seems new, fresh and surprising." - Philip Hensher, Mail on Sunday
"the first volume of a large scale, sympathetic two-volume enterprise by Max Saunders, based on new sources and research, and a different view of the biographical problem ... culminates in an extended account of The Good Soldier, which is given a rigorous and enlightening reading ... will be welcomed as a serious and invaluable interpretation which enables us to look at Ford's dual life - on the page and off it - with much greater complexity." - Malcolm Bradbury, The Guardian
"This is the first volume of an excellent biography of a truly difficult subject ... Max Saunders's biography does full justice to the complications of Ford's life and art ... fired by critical admiration ... Saunders excels in scrupulous unpicking of fine but important distinctions and nuances." - Caroline Moore, Sunday Telegraph
"Saunders's excellent Introduction is a thought-provoking meditation upon literary biography in general and its particular application to Ford ... The main achievement of his biography is to show the fascinating and productive interplay between fact and fiction, life and art, autobiography and impressionism." - Peter Parker, The Independent
"a scholarly two-volume work intended to correct the small factual errors of previous workjs, as well as the larger errors of interpretation ... Max Saunders has produced a thoughtful and authoritative biography" - Tim Haigh, The Independent on Sunday
"This thorough examination of both the roots and flowers of Ford's life has produced a work of masterly critical scholarship, detailed, measured, objective, fair and understanding ... Fordian scholars should be grateful for Saunders's work ... Max Saunders's book is a tribute to his seriousness and his importance. It is also a notable addition to scholarly biography." - Alan Judd, The Spectator
"His book is a wholly admirable example of the scholarly biography, which exists to cast light on its subject's work, not to draw its own light from it. It is compelling and enjoyable." - Allan Massie, Daily Telegraph
"Saunders, in this immensely scholarly book, tracks in detail and with ardent empathy the links between Ford's muddles and Ford's fiction, and to this end digs up a number of forgotten texts ... likely to become the standard Life." - London Review of Books
"definitive and ample biography ... Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life is both meticulous to a fault and bright with insight" - The Times Higher Education Supplement
"In writing as in life, Ford made up his own rules as he went along. At long last a biographer has got his measure." - Ian Collins, Eastern Daily Press
"No admirer of Ford Madox Ford will want to miss Max Saunders's two-volume ... about this extraordinary and complicated man. Saunders triumphantly establishes him as one of the most generous and influential figures of his time." - Miranda Seymour, The Sunday Times
"persuasive and immensely authoitative account of a man who has, for far too long, been overshadowed by his bitchy and thankless protégés" - Miranda Seymour, The Independent
"Mr Saunders meets the challenge through his remorseless scholarship. In a sense, his two volumes are a lesson in anatomy, with the literary surgeon taking justifiable pride in his skill with the scalpel and delighting in the exposure of that particular sinew, that particular nerve ... no one wishing to understand Ford dare ignore his probings." - The Economist
"The deep focus of Max Saunder's Ford Madox Ford, now completed by a second volume ... means that any other prospective Ford biographers out there can shut up shop." - Julian Barnes, The Sunday Times
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