John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand

Now in paperback, Richard Reeves’ beautifully written book is the definitive life of one of the heroic giants of Victorian England and the first biography for general readers since 1954: ‘The best book I have read in a long time’ - Ben Wilson, ‘Literary Review’. 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.