Today Katherine Rundell’s engaging and witty new biography explores John Donne’s early years, the family’s history of religious dissent, and a rumour about Thomas More’s pickled head…

This prize-winning new biography of John Donne reveals him as an “infinity merchant”, a man whose preaching could make his congregation weep, a poet whose “beauty deserved walk-on music”.

Rundell champions an impossible to categorise man: pirate, soldier, scholar, priest, inventor of new words and author of some of most intensely and intimately passionate poetry in English. Donne was a Catholic who lost - or left - his faith, from a family of martyrs, whose career led him to become Dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral.

Read by Blake Ritson
Abridged by Richard Hamilton
Produced by Allegra McIlroy Show less