A young activist and highly-educated Cambridge Union debater, Mill would become in time the highest-ranked English thinker of the nineteenth century, the author of the landmark essay On Liberty and one of the most passionate reformers and advocates of his revolutionary, opinionated age. As a journalist he fired off a weekly article on Irish land reform as the people of that nation starved, as an MP he introduced the first vote on women's suffrage, fought to preserve free-speech and opposed slavery, and, in his private life, pursued for two decades a love affair with another man's wife. To understand Mill and his contribution, Richard Reeves explores his life and work in tandem. His book is a riveting and authoritative biography of a man raised to promote happiness, whose life was spent in the pursuit of truth and liberty for all.
"Richard Reeves' sparkling new biography succeeds triumphantly. Practically every aspect of Mill's life and thought is freshly presented."
Independent
"Gripping and authoritative... Liberty, individualism and imagination were the essence of Mill's thought, and now that Mill's liberalism seems to have finally run its course, Reeves spells out its implications with exemplary lucidity, thoroughness and brio."
Observer
"Richard Reeves has assembled an impressive array of material and marshalled it with great style... the pace never slackens, the writing is slick and lucid."
