Books by Charles Nicholl

Charles Nicholl pieces together the shadowy story of Rimbaud s life as a trader, explorer and gun-runner.

Travels in Thailand and Burma in 1968, learning about the spiritual traditions of forest Buddhism.

A reconstruction of Sir Walter Raleigh's 1595 South American journey, this book combines scholarship with travelogue, and offers an understanding of the meanings of the El Dorado myth. It seeks to analyze and bring to life the experience of Raleigh's voyage to the Orinoco Delta.

In these wonderfully stylish and eclectic essays, Charles Nicholl pursues the fugitive traces of the past with the skill and relish that have earned him a reputation as one of the finest literary and historical detectives of our time.His subjects range from a murder-case in Renaissance Rome to the disappearance of Jim Thompson in 1960s Malaya, from the boyhood of Christopher Marlowe to the crimes of Jack the Ripper, from the remnants of a lost Shakespeare play to the last days of the poet-boxer Arthur Cravan in a Mexican fishing port.Full of insights, curiosities and unexpected discoveries, these thirty pieces written over two decades show the author of The Lodger and Leonardo da Vinci at his inquisitive best.

In 1612 Shakespeare gave evidence at the Court of Requests in Westminster it is the only occasion his spoken words are recorded. The case seems routine a dispute over an unpaid marriage-dowry but it opens up an unexpected window into the dramatist s famously obscure life-story. Charles Nicholl applies a powerful biographical magnifying glass to this fascinating episode in Shakespeare s life. Marshalling evidence from a wide variety of sources, including previously unknown documentary material on the Mountjoys, he conjures up a detailed and compelling description of the circumstances in which Shakespeare lived and worked, and in which he wrote such plays as Othello, Measure for Measure and King Lear.

The circumstances were shady, the official account - a violent quarrel over the bill, or 'recknynge' - long regarded as dubious. For the first time tracing Marlowe's shadowy political and intelligence dealings, Charles Nicholl uncovers critical new evidence about that fatal day.

Leonardo is the greatest, most multi-faceted and most mysterious of all Renaissance artists, but extraordinarily, considering his enormous reputation, this is the first full-length biography in English for several decades. Prize-winning author Charles Nicholl has immersed himself for five years in all the manuscripts, paintings and artefacts to produce an 'intimate portrait' of Leonardo. He uses these contemporary materials - his notebooks and sketchbooks, eye witnesses and early biographies, etc - as a way into the mental tone and physical texture of his life and has made myriad small discoveries about him and his work and his circle of associates. Among much else, the book identifies what Nicholl argues is an unknown portrait of the artist hanging in a church near Lodi in northern Italy. It also contains new material on his eccentric assistant Tomasso Masini, on his homosexual affairs in Florence, and on his curious relationship with a female model and/or prostitute from Cremona. A masterpiece of modern biography.