James Thomson

Llewelyn Powys’s penetrating portrait of James Thomson (B.V.) tracks the poet’s stark journey from army schoolmaster to the uncompromising author of The City of Dreadful Night. With vivid, unsentimental clarity, Powys illuminates Thomson’s friendships, London solitude, bouts of insomnia and drink, and the iron logic of his pessimism. The result is a bracing, compassionate study of a brilliant mind wrestling with despair—and the hard-won art it produced. Narrated by Mark Roddy with a steady, empathetic touch, this audiobook brings Powys’s luminous prose and Thomson’s haunted world into sharp relief, perfect for listeners of literary biography, poetry lovers, and fans of nineteenth-century letters.