Donald Adamson, biographer, historical writer,
translator, editor and literary critic, is a former Visiting
Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He is the author of
Blaise Pascal: Mathematician, Physicist, and Thinker about
God, which assesses the scientific and theological aspects
of Pascal’s thought as well as his literary achievement in
The Provincial Letters and the (unfinished)
Pensées. He has made a particular study of Balzac,
about whom he has written two books, and two of whose novels,
Ursule Mirouët and La Rabouilleuse, he has
translated for the Penguin Classics. (The
latter is entitled The Black Sheep.) His current
project in this area is a translation and critique of Balzac’s
novel La Recherche de l’Absolu (The
Quest of the Absolute). An authority on the French
Romantic movement, he has published Les Romantiques
français devant la peinture espagnole, where the influence
of Spanish painting – Zurbarán, El Greco, Velázquez, Ribera,
etc – upon Théophile Gautier and other writers is studied in
some depth. For the Folio Society he has translated twenty-six
of Maupassant’s short stories as Bed 29. He is the
co-author of a family history, The House of Nell Gwyn,
and under the title of Rides Round Britain he has
edited a selection of the travel journals of John Byng, fifth
Viscount Torrington. An authority on early English banking
history, he has written the history of one of the City of
London’s oldest livery companies. He has edited the first
published account of T.S. Eliot’s life and is a contributor to
the Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography. He is also the author
of an as yet unpublished diary. A graduate of Magdalen
College, Oxford, he is a Doctor of Philosophy of Oxford
University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature,
the Royal Historical Society and the Society of Antiquaries of
London.
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