A writer's writer who will no doubt inspire her own cult following

Amanda Foreman

Stunning … A brilliant, giddy-making portrait … Wilson's narrative [has] a wonderfully hallucinatory effect … Energetic and wonderfully compelling

Kathryn Hughes, Mail on Sunday

In connecting the architecture of De Quincey's wild, opium-fuelled mind with physical surroundings, Wilson provides a handrail through the pandemonium and isolation. He emerges from her book a sympathetic but irresponsible obsessive… Wilson has successfully brought De Quincey out from under the shadow of his contemporaries. He stands before us deeply flawed … But he was also a dreamer of the best dreams in literature

Ruth Scurr, Daily Telegraph

A richly intelligent and well-informed study, which will surely become the favoured one of our time

Financial Times

Tremendous … A seamless, stirring, sublime biography, which takes you to the heart, or rather the head, of the opium-eater. Whether you are more repelled or mesmerised by him, it's hard to dispute that De Quincey was the most complex and unpredictable writer of his times

Evening Standard

Multilayered and wonderfully insightful

John Walsh, Sunday Times