Book summary

A biography of the 17th-century poet and nobleman. Rochester was a complex and highly self-destructive figure: a sophisticated degenerate who wrote devotional verse and died of excess at 33, a nobleman who cultivated a taste for squalor, and a Cavalier with strong Puritan impulses. Greene's biography, originally written in the 1930s but deemed too lurid for publication, is accompanied by a series of period illustrations.

Media reviews

"This delightfully written biography is truly the narrative of a rake's progress....Greene has succeeded in giving his subject a three-dimenional quality, and the illustrations selected help to bring the period to life."