"John Donne led myriad lives. He was a lawyer, a sea adventurer, a preacher, an MP, and a poet. Along the way he converted from Catholicism to Protestantism. He was also imprisoned for marrying a 16-year old girl without her father's consent; struggled to feed a family of twelve children; and was often ill and in pain. He was a man who suffered from black surges of misery yet expressed in his verse many breathtaking impressions of electric joy and love. In a biography that marks the arrival of a huge non-fiction talent, Katherine Rundell uses a witty and spirited entry point, an 'act of evangelism' to unveil the man behind the words. Donne preached sermons that drew vast crowds; this was a man with a rhetorical power to which in response people would push forward as if at a football match: at one reading, two people were nearly crushed to death. He knew how to harness language into something new.