Claire Tomalin writes literary biographies that are as compulsive to read as they are insightful, and her narrative virtuosity was rewarded in 2002 when her biography of Samuel Pepys, published by Penguin, won the Whitbread Book of the Year. In Young Bysshe Tomalin tells the story of the formative years of the poet Shelley - and brings the young radical and his world vividly to life.

By the end of his first term Shelley had decided that Hogg must bind their friendship still closer by wooing his sister Elizabeth. Letters from Field Place elaborated on this plan alongside laments over the 'uncongenial jollities of Xmas', the loss of Harriet and some fierce disputes with his father over the question of religious faith. Mrs Shelley became alarmed by her son's tendencies too: 'My mother fancies me on the High Road to Pandemonium, she fancies I want to make a deistical coterie of all my little sisters.' And it was true that Shelley was now able to assail conventional Christian belief with every logical weapon from the Enlightenment armoury; he was encouraged by Hogg, who sent him 'a systematic cudgel for Xtianity' during the vacation.

His father's hope was that he would enter for a poetry prize when he returned for the Lent term. He had published a second novel, St Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian, 'by a Gentleman of the University of Oxford', written to much the same formula as Zastrozzi but with additional supernatural elements. Although it was now on display in Slatter Munday's window it deserved to be, and was, a failure. Another publication was a volume of poems, Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson by 'John Fitzvictor'. The humour of the title was that Mrs Nicholson was a mad washerwoman who had attempted to kill George III in 1786; it was not much of a joke, and the poems are inept whether political, erotic or lamenting lost happiness. But here and there a glimpse of later themes appears. An invocation to despair contains a Shelleyan turn of phrase:

Arise ye sightless spirits of the storm.
Ye unseen minstrels of the aerial song .

And another poem produces a characteristic encounter. 'I met a maniac, like he was to me.' This was not a merely poetic notion; Shelley told Hogg and other friends that 'I myself am often mad.' His cousin Medwin believed that 'insanity hung as by a hair suspended over the head of Shelley' and there were times when not only his family but also, later, so close and sympathetic observer as Thomas Love Peacock took the view that his behaviour passed beyond the bounds of the normal.

If you like this book, you may also like these:

Protobiography - William Boyd
Caligula - Robert Graves
The Aristocratic Adventurer - David Cannadine