For many years the biography by Enid Starkie was considered the final word on Rimbaud, though it focused largely on the early years and the dangerous liaison with Verlaine - that is to say, on Rimbaud's brief career as a poet. That was cut short voluntarily when he forswore literature and went to Africa as a trader and semi-smuggler in the kind of steamy milieu familiar from Conrad's novels. The remaining 19 years of his life have generally been regarded as anti-climax and failure, but Graham Robb shows that Rimbaud was in fact a fairly astute, tough businessman and well able to cope with the colonial way of life. Eventually a growth on his knee which turned out to be cancerous drove him home to a French hospital, where he was operated on but could not be saved. Literary fame was largely posthumous. A good corrective to previous accounts.