Nine Hypochondriac Lives

Tormented Hope

'It's so good that, after reading it, I needed a lie-down' - Hilary Mantel, Guardian Books of the Year 
 
Brian Dillon looks at nine prominent hypochondriacs - James Boswell, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Daniel Paul Schreber, Alice James, Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould and Andy Warhol - and what their lives tell us about the way the mind works with, and against, the body. His findings are stimulating and surprising, and the stories he tells are often moving, sometimes hilarious, and always gripping. With a new afterword on Michael Jackson. 
 
Brian Dillon's first book, In the Dark Room, won the Irish Book Award for Non-fiction in 2006. He lives in Canterbury.

It's so good that, after reading it, I needed a lie-down.

Fascinating ... Written with great elegance and shrewd understanding

Brian Dillon is a superbly careful writer. ... [This book] will delight, move and horrify any of the millions of us who, like the late Spike Milligan, have at one time or another contemplated having "I told you I was ill" inscribed on our gravestones.

Strangely delightful  ... Dillon's book is constantly intelligent

You don't need to be a hypochondriac to enjoy this series of discursive, insightful essays that are full of quirky details and fascinating anecdotes

Dillon's mind is as interesting as those of the people he writes about ... bizarrely unputdownable

Brian Dillon was born in Dublin in 1969. He writes on the arts, books and culture for a number of publications. His first book, In the Dark Room, won the Irish Book Award for Non-fiction in 2006. He lives in Canterbury.

Brian Dillon looks at nine prominent hypochondriacs - James Boswell, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Daniel Paul Schreber, Alice James, Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould and Andy Warhol - and what their lives tell us about the way the mind works with, and against, the body. His findings are stimulating and surprising, and the stories he tells are often moving, sometimes hilarious, and always gripping.

Brian Dillon

A subtle, human history of the early twentieth century ... The Great Explosion deftly covers a tumultuous period of history while centring on the tiniest moments - just punctuation marks in time

A brilliant evocation of place grasped in its modernity

[Dillon's] account of the Faversham explosion is as bold as it is dramatic, while his descriptive passages about the marshlands of Kent are so evocative that you can practically feel the mud sticking at your feet

Dillon ... has a WG Sebald-like gift for interrogating the landscape ... a work of real elegiac seriousness that goes to the heart of a case of human loss and destruction in England's sinister pastures green

Gunpowder, the Great War, and a Disaster on the Kent Marshes

In April 1916, a fire started in a vast munitions works located in the marshes of Kent. The resulting series of explosions killed 108 people and injured many more. 
 
In a brilliant piece of storytelling, Brian Dillon recreates the events of that terrible day - and, in so doing, sheds a fresh and unexpected light on the British home front in the Great War. He offers a chilling natural history of explosives and their effects on the earth, on buildings, and on human and animal bodies. And he evokes with vivid clarity one of Britain's strangest and most remarkable landscapes - where he has been a habitual explorer for many years. The Great Explosion is a profound work of narrative, exploration and inquiry from one of our most brilliant writers.

Brian Dillon

Praise for The Great Explosion

A subtle, human history of the early twentieth century ... The Great Explosion deftly covers a tumultuous period of history while centring on the tiniest moments - just punctuation marks in time

A brilliant evocation of place grasped in its modernity

[Dillon's] account of the Faversham explosion is as bold as it is dramatic, while his descriptive passages about the marshlands of Kent are so evocative that you can practically feel the mud sticking at your feet ...

A subtle, human history of the early twentieth century ... The Great Explosion deftly covers a tumultuous period of history while centring on the tiniest moments - just punctuation marks in time

A brilliant evocation of place grasped in its modernity

[Dillon's] account of the Faversham explosion is as bold as it is dramatic, while his descriptive passages about the marshlands of Kent are so evocative that you can practically feel the mud sticking at your feet ...

A subtle, human history of the early twentieth century ... The Great Explosion deftly covers a tumultuous period of history while centring on the tiniest moments - just punctuation marks in time

A brilliant evocation of place grasped in its modernity

[Dillon's] account of the Faversham explosion is as bold as it is dramatic, while his descriptive passages about the marshlands of Kent are so evocative that you can practically feel the mud sticking at your feet ...

Books by Brian Dillon

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