Skip navigation
London Review of Books London Review Bookshop

Articles marked subscriber-only content are available to registered subscribers to the print edition of the London Review of Books. For information about subscribing to the LRB, click here. If you are already a subscriber and you wish to register for online access, click here. Articles marked not in archive are not currently available in the LRB online archive.

Colin Burrow

Colin Burrow is a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He edited The Complete Sonnets and Poems for the Oxford Shakespeare. You can hear him talking about Milton at http://www.christs.cam.ac.uk/milton400/burrow.htm

From the London Review dated 20 January 2005

Who wouldn’t buy it?

“Literary biography is often written for people who don’t much fancy reading plays and who want to be reassured that some of the superstitions they have about the relationship between human activities and social causality have some descriptive force. The explanations of literary activity which are required by the market for literary biography tend to be made up from a dash of Freud, a handful of social aspiration, a scratching from Foucault’s armpit, and a willingness to entertain simple one-to-one correspondences between fiction and life.” [ read more . . . ]

Selected bibliography

  • Metaphysical Poetry edited by Colin Burrow, introduction by Christopher Ricks (2006)
  • The Complete Sonnets and Poems by William Shakespeare, edited by Colin Burrow (2002)
  • Edmund Spenser (1996)
  • Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (1993)

Search the web for Colin Burrow: Google · Yahoo! · AltaVista · Wikipedia

In the LRB archive

subscriber-only content Cumin-coated · 14 August 2008

subscriber-only content New Model Criticism · 19 June 2008

subscriber-only content The Audience Throws Vegetables · 8 May 2008

subscriber-only content A Hee-Haw to Apuleius · 1 November 2007

subscriber-only content Conflationism · 21 June 2007

subscriber-only content It’s a lie · 2 November 2006

Recribrations · 5 October 2006

Not Quite Nasty · 9 February 2006

subscriber-only content No Way Out · 20 October 2005

  • Memoir by John McGahern

subscriber-only content You and Your Bow and the Gods · 22 September 2005

  • A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels and Systems of Thought by Stephen Kern  Buy this book

Who wouldn’t buy it? · 20 January 2005

subscriber-only content Halifax hots up · 21 October 2004

subscriber-only content Time to Mount Spain · 2 September 2004

  • The Prince and the Infanta: The Cultural Politics of the Spanish Match by Glyn Redworth  Buy this book

subscriber-only content Imparadised · 19 February 2004

  • Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens by Rebecca Bushnell

subscriber-only content Frisks, Skips and Jumps · 6 November 2003

  • Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher by Anne Hartle

Tuesday Girl · 6 March 2003

  • Transformations of Love: The Friendship of John Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin by Frances Harris

subscriber-only content Grit in the Oyster-Shell · 14 November 2002

  • Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin

subscriber-only content A Joke Too Far · 22 August 2002

  • Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift by Jason Scott-Warren

subscriber-only content Chapmaniac · 27 June 2002

  • Chapman’s Homer: The ‘Iliad’ edited by Allardyce Nicoll  Buy this book
  • Chapman’s Homer: The ‘Odyssey’ edited by Allardyce Nicoll  Buy this book

Waves of Wo · 5 July 2001

  • A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres by George Gascoigne, edited by G.W. Pigman

subscriber-only content I Don’t Know Whats · 22 February 2001

  • Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso, translated by Anthony Esolen

Not currently in the LRB archive

 not available in archive Not for Horrid Profs · 1 June 2000

 not available in archive Imperiumsinefinism · 2 March 2000

  • Virgil’s Experience: Nature and History; Times, Names and Places by Richard Jenkyns

 not available in archive Brattishness · 11 November 1999

  • Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life by W.A. Sessions

 not available in archive A Pickwick among Poets, Exiled in the Fatherland of Pickled Fish · 19 August 1999

  • The English Horace: Anthony Alsop and the Traditions of British Latin Verse by D.K. Money

 not available in archive Then place my purboil’d Head upon a Stake · 7 January 1999

  • Poetry and Revolution: An Anthology of British and Irish Verse 1625-1660 edited by Peter Davidson

From the LRB letters page