“Graham Robb tells the tremendous story of Hugo's life quite brilliantly."
— The [London] Times

Victor Hugo was the most important writer of the nineteenth century in France: founder and destroyer of the Romantic movement, revolutionary playwright, seminal poet, epic novelist, author of the last universally accessible masterpieces in the European tradition, among them Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Noire Dame. He was also a radical political thinker (and eventual exile from both France and England); a gifted painter and architect; a visionary and mystic who conversed with Virgil, Shakespeare, and Jesus Christ — in short a tantalizing. Protean personality who dominated, distracted, and maddened his contemporaries.
Attempts to explain this bewildering complexity have generated a literature of memorable paradoxes. If there were a being higher than God, wrote Ford Madox Ford, one would have to say that it was Victor Hugo. Andre Gide, asked who the greatest French poet was, replied, "Victor Hugo, alas!" And Jean Cocteau famously defined Victor Hugo as a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.
Graham Robb has written a magnificent and engaging biography that does full justice to the drama of his subject s life — a life that Robb calls “the most lucid case of madness in literature." By grasping the giant in his entirety, and in his many disguises, Robb rewards us with a panorama of French and European society from the Revolution to the dawn of the twentieth century.