The life of W.B. Yeats is the Everest of Irish literary biographies: there is no more challenging task for a biographer than to give an accurate and fair account of this extraordinarily complex and contradictory man. Terence Brown is not daunted: this is the most reliable, thorough telling of the whole life yet available. Brown is certainly undaunted by his subject's fame; at all times his judgments are balanced and where he feels condemnation is called for, he is never afraid to supply it: "noxious anti-Catholic elitism" is just one of the terms he is prepared to invoke when the occasion requires it. There is now a great deal more knowledge and openness than formerly about the poet's sexually obsessed later years; Brown does not shirk this material, while making clear how important Yeats's marriage remained to him through all this turbulence. Even when Roy Foster's magisterial two-volume life is completed, this book will still command attention, thanks above all to the quality of the literary analysis embedded in it. Here, Brown is in his element, and has carved out his own niche among Yeats biographers.