Biographies of Yeats have come thick and fast in the past decade, and though this one has been well reviewed, I should hesitate to call it essential. It might be fairer to call it a biography for middlebrows, soundly researched and sensible, but occasionally rather lacking in insight into the period, or periods, of Yeats's later fame. Anxious to prove himself a man of action, he showed no flair for politics except literary ones; believing in the need to restore the aristocratic principle in life, he made rather a fool of himself over the demagogue O'Duffy; a respectable family man, he was at pains to parade his mistresses. His stature, however, remains unaffected and in fact one's respect for Yeats the man, as well as the poet, is enhanced in the end. Incidentally, Brenda Maddox is one of the first Yeatsian commentators to admit that his wife George drank heavily - a fact well known and talked about in Dublin in my youth.