[Morande's] life reads like the script of a film, but in this minutely researched and well-written book the author uses his extraordinary life to demonstrate the scope and importance of the world-changing events Morande lived through and chronicled. 

Good Book Guide

Morande's career [is] finely illuminated in Simon Burrows's biography

Colin Jones, New York Review of Books

Good review in Standpoint.

Standpoint

[An] excellent resurrection of Morande ... pacily written with a delicious sense of absurdity

Literary Review

Simon Burrows, in the first attempt to reconstruct [Morande's] shadowy life since 1886, pursues him relentlessly through print and archive and the mists of obfuscation that were his natural habitat, and produces a fascinating portrait of a paradoxical man who lived by his poisonous pen.

Times Literary Supplement

... Burrows' lively, authoritative, and comprehensive narrative will make the compelling story more widely available... In [his] exemplary biography of Morande, libertine morality and political liberalism are situated uncomfortably, but convincingly side by side.

European History Quarterly, Vol. 41 No. 4