Crackling with gusto and sympathetic intelligence, Super-Infinite places John Donne fairly and squarely in his own times, while making those times feel contiguous with our own. Donne loved the trans-prefix: it’s scattered everywhere across his writing – ‘transpose’, ‘translate’, ‘transport’, ‘transubstantiate’. This fine book demands and rewards your fullest concentration, just as its subject does: a super-infinite amount, in fact.

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne review

This is a determinedly deft book, and I would have liked it to billow a little more, making room for more extensive readings of the poems and larger arguments about the Renaissance. A bystander remarked that he ‘suffered with great constancy, but did not evince such signs of joy and alacrity in meeting death as his two companions’.Donne hunted death, battled it, killed it, saluted it, threw it parties,” as Rundell splendidly puts it, and he did so in the face of his own death, using protracted illness as an occasion for intense and intricately composed meditations, and quite literally posing for a portrait in his shroud.

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne - Winner of

Donne’s family history was one of blood and fire; a great-uncle was arrested in an anti-Catholic raid and executed: another was locked inside the Tower of London, where as a small schoolboy Donne visited him, venturing fearfully in among the men convicted to death. This book, then, hopes to do both: both to tell the story of his life, and to point to the places in his work where his words are at their most singular: where his words can be, for a modern reader, galvanic. All Donne scholars must be profoundly grateful to him: but, equally, rarely has a man been so keen to make his subject appear a shining example to all humanity. Those who love Donne have no choice but to relish the challenge of piecing him together from a patchwork of what we do and do not know. As a student, a young priest whom his brother had tried to shelter was captured, hanged, drawn and quartered.He converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, was imprisoned for marrying a highborn girl without her father’s consent, struggled to feed a family of ten children and was often ill and in pain. Rundell's first book, published in 2011, was The Girl Savage; it told the story of Wilhelmina Silver, a girl from Zimbabwe, who is sent to an English boarding-school following the death of her father. Interview: 'Taking life advice from John Donne would be disastrous' – the roof-walking, trapeze-flying Baillie Gifford winner". In a different sermon, he wrote of how we would one day be with God in ‘an infinite, a super-infinite, an unimaginable space, millions of millions of unimaginable spaces in heaven’. Bei