The received picture we have of Milton the man is generally a "dark" one - the Puritan and regicide, who allegedly hated women and was hated by his own daughters, a propagandist for Cromwell and a sometimes scurrilous pamphleteer, priggish and invincibly self righteous, until he was forced by the 1660 Restoration to live out his days in sullen seclusion. Wilson's picture is very different. In the first place, there is Milton's acknowledged personal charm and politeness - when he visited Italy as a young man he was a great social success and made many lasting friendships, even with intellectual Catholic clerics in Florence and Rome. The troubles in his first marriage (an unwise one in any case) are blamed largely on his wife's family, and on his mother in law in particular; the wife herself, Mary Powell, returned to him voluntarily and was taken back without much fuss or reproach. His hatred of Charles I and the court was in accord with his intellectual republicanism, and though for a time he was a close follower and eulogist of Cromwell, he seems to have reacted later against the Lord Protector's brutality and opportunism. Milton's noted virulence as a pamphleteer and public debater contrasts with his civility to others as a private man - he was in fact more famous in his lifetime for his attacks on monarchy, and his notorious defence of divorce, than he was as a poet. He seems to have remained friendly and approachable in old age, although the Restoration had impoverished him (as a known regicide, he was probably lucky in any case to get away so lightly); he and the much younger Dryden, for instance, became good friends, though Milton thought Dryden a rhymer". Milton's last years were relatively serene, now that his great epic poem had at last been written and published, and the choruses in Samson Agonistes are probably an accurate reflection of his inner life. An ultra readable biography, neither too detailed nor too long - 17th century English domestic politics, and 7th century religious quarrels, can easily become involved and tedious.