In the original dust cover. Navy cloth binding with gilt title on the spine.

Please view the photographs.A £6 reduction when collected from the FBA shop.

Review: It may be egregiously unfair to say that Alter’s excellent biography of Stendhal doesn’t measure up to the competition, but so it seems to me.

Take, for example, Matthew Josephson’s 1946 effort. It may be inaccurate, as Alter points out, but Josephson’s passion for his subject pervades the book. In fact, in his preface Josephson movingly and eloquently states why Stendhal is his favorite writer. Too bad that he didn’t have the benefit of “scholarship” up to Alter’s time (some of which borders on mania, like Stendhal’s “itineraries”) but he’s a better writer than Alter and has more enthusiasm for his subject, which is a necessity when writing about Henri Beyle.

F.C. Green’s 1939 volume is also very well written, up-to-date for its period, but the major drawback, according to Alter, is that Green doesn’t translate the French quotations. This is a minor issue, I’d say, since most lovers of Stendhal are likely to be able to read some French and can get the rest with a good dictionary. Again, Green is a much better writer than Alter.

Gita May may be an academic pill, but Joanna Richardson knows how to write a readable biography, and for Alter to say she doesn’t have a “point of view” is questionable, to say the least.

Actually, Alter couldn’t know, but the best biography of Stendhal in English if you wants facts, feeling, and interpretation is Jonathan Keates, which came out after Alter.

Alter seems to me to be just a few steps below Gita May. He’s an academic critic with the usual drawbacks of the species. I know he’s first-rate in those terms, but I think he ought to be a bit more humble about what he accomplished, because he definitely believed he’d written the best bio of Stendhal when he wrote the preface to this volume. But Keates trumped him, and an attentive reader who tries the other bios I’ve mentioned will see quickly that earlier attempts are preferable, even if they’re “inaccurate”.

An original book from the library gathered by the famous Cambridge Don, computer scientist, food and wine connoisseur, Jack Arnold LANG. In 2008, Jack was one of the co-founders of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, alongside other members of the Department, and acted as the Foundation’s Chair. The project’s original goals were modest: to build and distribute low-cost computers for prospective applicants to our Computer Science degree. Initially the project was a “success disaster”, as Jack would say, as demand far outstripped the low-scale manufacturing plans. Ultimately the Raspberry Pi became the UK’s most successful computer with more than 60 million sold to date. Jack was drawn to the educational possibilities of the Raspberry Pi, its potential uses in emerging economies and the way it could support self-directed learning.