A Peculiar Man : A Life of George Moore.

Cloth, 8vo, 24 cm, 344 pp, plates. From the blurb - "In a spoof 1894 Booker Prize Contest at the 1994 Cheltenham Festival, Esther Waters was picked as outright winner from a shortlist including The Jungle Book, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Prisoner of Zenda and The Diary of a Nobody. The author of Esther Waters was in his day far more famous than even Kipling or Conan Doyle. Many of Moore's books caused sensations. He had the audacity to re-tell the Gospel story with a different ending: Jesus does not die on the Cross but recovers in the tomb and retires to an Essene monastery, where he is discovered in his old age by a furious Saint Paul angered at finding that he has been preaching a lie all his life. Another 'book, Confessions of a Young Man, revealed the secrets of Moore's wicked, wicked life as an art student in the Paris of Manet and Monet and Degas and explored the stream of consciousness technique 15 years before Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. His monumental trilogy, Hail and Farewell, lambasted almost everyone connected with the Irish Literary Revival. He was an absentee landlord with vast lands in the West of Ireland. A typical Irish bachelor with a great way with women, he never married, He was a spoiled painter turned art critic, who introduced the Impressionists to the British public. He had the gall to class himself in the same street as Shakespeare and Milton. Where sex was concerned, as this book demonstrates, he was a very peculiar man. In A Peculiar Man, the first full biography of Moore to be published since 1938, Tony Gray has reconstructed Moore's life and career in Moore's own words and those of his contemporaries, and has conveyed such a haunting impression of Moore's prose style, his odd ideas and above all his humour, that it will surely lead to a general revival of interest in Moore's own work." Slightly agetoned, otherwise Very Good in Very Good dustwrapper.…