Yale Nota Bene
2 total works
R.S.S. Baden-Powell, who founded the Boy Scouts movement in 1908, was a British military hero during the Boer War and an author, actor, artist, spy, sportsman, and female impersonator. In this absorbing and humane account of Baden-Powell’s extraordinary life, Tim Jeal reveals for the first time the complex figure behind the saintly public mask, showing him to be a man of both dazzling talents and crippling secret fears.
Reviews of the earlier edition:
“Baden-Powell’s life story is as rich and engrossing as any of his memorable campfire yarns . . . a monumental biography.”—Zara Steiner, New York Times Book Review
“In an age of good biographies, here is one that deserves to be called great . . . a magnificent book.”—Piers Brendon, Mail on Sunday
“Jeal’s Baden-Powell is brave and self-seeking, devious and honorable, a domestic paragon whose repressed homosexuality fired his career, a soldier of genius who ultimately rejected militarism. . . . The story that Tim Jeal has to tell is epic, funny, and touching.”—Philip Oakes, New Statesman
“Superb.”—Ian Buruma, New York Review of Books
Reviews of the earlier edition:
“Baden-Powell’s life story is as rich and engrossing as any of his memorable campfire yarns . . . a monumental biography.”—Zara Steiner, New York Times Book Review
“In an age of good biographies, here is one that deserves to be called great . . . a magnificent book.”—Piers Brendon, Mail on Sunday
“Jeal’s Baden-Powell is brave and self-seeking, devious and honorable, a domestic paragon whose repressed homosexuality fired his career, a soldier of genius who ultimately rejected militarism. . . . The story that Tim Jeal has to tell is epic, funny, and touching.”—Philip Oakes, New Statesman
“Superb.”—Ian Buruma, New York Review of Books
Hailed as an explorer unrivalled since the Elizabethan era, Livingstone was also revered by the Victorians as a near saint - a myth in his own lifetime. This biography attempts to show that this myth of Livingstone was, in actual fact, a distortion of the truth and that the real man was far more remarkable - a man capable of ruthless cruelty as well as self-sacrifice, and dogged all his life by contradiction and failure; for Livingstone failed as a missionary, failed as a parent and failed on his search for the Nile's source.