Jonathan Swift (Pimlico)

by Victoria Glendinning

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) is an inexhaustibly intriguing figure in the literary and political history of England and Ireland. Best known as the author of Gulliver's Travels, he was an ordained clergyman whose enemies thought he did not believe in God. He became a legendary dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin whose ambition for church preferment in England was perpetually frustrated. For four short, intoxicating years he was the intimate of Queen Anne's chief ministers, as well as their publicist and propagandist - a "spin doctor" before the term was invented. His private life was intense and enigmatic. Two younger women, whom he called Stella and Vanessa, moved to Ireland to be close to him. He made both of them unhappy. Poet, polemicist, pamphleteer, and wit, Swift is the master of shock. His furious satirical responses to the corruption and hypocrisy he saw around him in private and public life have every relevance for our own times. His black imagination, and his preoccupatio