'Enlightening, moving' SIR IAN MCKELLEN From the acclaimed and bestselling biographer Jonathan Bate, a luminous new exploration of Shakespeare and how his themes can untangle comedy and tragedy, learning and loving in our modern lives.
Jonathan Bate Book order
This British author explores the profound connection between humanity and the natural world. His work, deeply influenced by Romanticism and with a keen focus on Shakespeare, offers insightful explorations of the human spirit and its place within the wider ecosystem. Through his critical and academic writings, he provides unique interpretations of classic texts while engaging with pressing ecological concerns. His prose is both scholarly and accessible, inviting readers to delve into complex themes with fresh understanding.






- 2022
- 2021
A dazzling biography of two interwoven, tragic lives: John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald. 'Highly engaging ... Go now, read this book' THE TIMES
- 2020
A dazzling new biography of Wordsworth's radical life as a thinker and poetical innovator, published to mark the 250th anniversary of his birth.
- 2019
How the Classics Made Shakespeare
- 384 pages
- 14 hours of reading
This book grew from the inaugural E. H. Gombrich Lectures in the Classical Tradition that I delivered in the autumn of 2013 at the Warburg Institute of the University of London, under the title, Ancient Strength: Shakespeare and the Classical Tradition--Preface, page ix.
- 2018
Titus Andronicus
- 174 pages
- 7 hours of reading
In his earliest and most graphic bloody tragedy, William Shakespeare brings us a depiction of the cycle of revenge that takes place between the Roman general Titus and his enemy Tamora, the Queen of the Goths.
- 2017
Can you be re-lit by poetry? This little book offers everyone one of the oldest of all remedies for stress: the reading of poetry. Intended to help you endure some of your stressful moments and painful experiences, these poems tell us we are not alone. Returned again and again over the centuries by great imaginations are love and death and memory - remembrance of childhood joy, of happy days and beautiful places, of loved ones we have lost or feeling at peace and at one with the natural world. 'Stressed Unstressed' harvests an array of poems on such themes in the hope that they will speak to you when you are processing your worries or when you simply want to fill your mind with different, more positive thoughts. Words can act as drugs, and on the bedside or in a waiting-room this little volume of poetry can help in all sorts of difficult circumstances. So here is a selection of new poems and old, enduring classics and forgotten gems. Next time you are feeling stressed or anxious, worried or sleepless, panicky or unable to cope, 'Stressed Unstressed' invites you to read a poem and join the thousands of others who have read and remembered and loved these poems - to form a very special community. This is bibliotherapy.
- 2017
Jonathan Bate believes that the slow, meditative reading of poetry - absorbing ourselves in the images of a poem, slowing to its beat, allowing our minds to rest in the pause of a line-ending - can bring us tranquility as we find echoes of our own experiences on the page.
- 2016
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZEGripping and at times ineffably sad, this book would be poetic even without the poetry. It will be the standard biography of Ted Hughes for a long time to come' Sunday TimesSeldom has the life of a writer rattled along with such furious activity ... A moving, fascinating biography' The Times
- 2015
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 'Gripping and at times ineffably sad, this book would be poetic even without the poetry. It will be the standard biography of Hughes for a long time to come'Sunday Times 'Captures the great poet in all his wild complexity. Powerful and clarifying, richly layered and compelling' Melvyn Bragg, Observer
- 2014
This book encourages palliative care professionals to adopt a holistic approach, emphasizing the importance of their relationships with patients as therapeutic resources. It discusses the role of counseling skills within an integrative biopsychosocial model of family systems medicine.
