The Five Most Important Books for Claire Tomalin

At last someone whose five most important books belong to the good classical stuff. Bible and Shakespeare, Stendhal and The Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse (no more, no less) - and the choice of each book is based also on the edition! Following this choice of great poets and famous editors, it's entering the charmed world where one remains forever; no one comes back from there: it is the world of the Selecti, of the Happy Few.

Claire Tomalin is Britain ' s literary grande dame (Newsweek). She is the author of several noted biographies: Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen, Katherine Mansfield, Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Pepys; each offers an insightful analysis, done with scrutiny and subtlety.

Here is her list of five most important books (along with her reasons), as presented in today's Newsweek (I tried to find for each book an onLine version):

1. La Chartreuse de Parme by Stendhal (conjures the post-Napoleonic period, from the battlefield of Waterloo to the intrigues at an Italian court where politics conflict with love).
2. The Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse edited by E. K. Chambers (here are the glories of English poetry: Wyatt, Campion, Shakespeare, giving sparks of genius as they play with words and verse forms).
3. The Complete Works of Shakespeare (one of the twin jewels of the English language; the other? below).
4. The Bible (no one can live without the Bible in the Authorized Version).
5. The Diary of Samuel Pepys edited by Latham and Matthews (Pepys was a young man on the make; I love his openness and lyrical appreciation of London).

Here you can read an excerpt from Thomas Hardy: A Time-Torn Man, the most recent book written by Claire Tomalin.

(A Life in Books)