Super-Infinite

The poet John Donne lived many lives: at times a religious outsider and a social disaster, at others a celebrity preacher, he was also a law scholar, an adventurer at sea, a member of Parliament, a priest and Dean of St Paul's Cathedral, as well as a poet of love. Katherine Rundell's biography sets out these many sides of Donne, his obsessions, his words and the Elizabethan age he lived in, and presents him as a remarkable mind and as a lesson in how to live. The book is a modern biography of the poet of love, sex and death. In 2023 it jointly won the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize.

On his list of the best non-fiction books of 2022, Tyler Cowen tentatively singled it out, with one other title, as his pick if he had to choose.