"A wonderful work that has many new things to say about Keats, his extraordinary work and inner life. A finer biography is unlikely to emerge this year."--Ian Thomson, "Financial Times"
--Ian Thomson"Financial Times" (09/22/2012)
"Far from being the handkerchief dabbling swain of popular Romantic stereotyping, Roe gives us a picture of Keats that matches the 'Cockney poet' tag used by the then Tory press."--Michael Conaghan, "Belfast Telegraph"

--Michael Conaghan"Belfast Telegraph" (07/13/2013)
"Keats is still popularly thought of as wan and delicate, but Roe's biography firmly readjusts that. . . Roe's is a remarkable achievement, authoritative and imaginative to a degree that should make all future Keats biographer quail" --John Carey, " The Sunday Times"--John Carey"Sunday Times" (07/07/2013)
"Roe's determination to make us look again at the Keats we think we know is admirable."--Ian Pindar, "The Guardian"--Ian Pindar"The Guardian" (01/07/2013)
"Roe's focus on Keats's early life challenges many of the things we think we know about the poet, bringing to the fore instead the sudden death of his father when he was very young, his mother's indecently hasty remarriage, and the family's social and financial decline. The impact of these events finds traces not only in the poetry, which Roe examines closely to show a truly radical poet in his challenging of traditional forms, but also in the later life, where is where we find a much more determined individual than we might have imagined."--Lesley McDowell, "Independent on Sunday"

--Lesley McDowell"Independent on Sunday" (07/14/2013)
"This new book promises to become the definitive biography of one of the major Romantic poets. Keats has of course been well served by biographers, but what Roe adds to these Lives is his own superbly detailed, finely discriminating understanding of and research into the events of Keats's life, of individuals in his family and wider circle, and of the larger historical contexts in which the poet lived and wrote. The result is a book that supplements in countless minor details what is already known about the poet. For decades to come, readers and scholars of Keats will rely on the wealth of detail that Roe has uncovered and recorded."--Andrew Bennett, author of "Keats, Narrative and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing"--Andrew Bennett
"There have been many fine biographies of Keats since the war.... But none, I think, conveys quite so well as this one the sense of Keats as a poet of the London suburbs. Roe reconstructs beautifully the milieu from which he and his friends all came, on the northern edge of the city where they had their day jobs and dreamed of fame."--Ferdinand Mount, "The Spectator"--Ferdinand Mount "The Spectator "
"A fine biography full of the sharp sense of place and particularity that distinguishes Roe's earlier work" - Seamus Perry, "Literary Review"--Seamus Perry "Literary Review "
"Roe's is a remarkable achievement, authoritative and imaginative to a degree that should make all future Keats biographers quail./i>--John Carey "Sunday Times "
'An astonishingly fresh and observant new biography, with a magical sense of shifting moods and places. Meticulously researched and precisely visualised, it produces a kind of hypnotic video portrait of Keats, day-by-day and sometimes hour-by-hour. The fine evocation of the poet's disturbed City childhood is brilliantly fed back into the complex imagery of the later poetry. Above all perhaps, Roe's deep knowledge of Keats's wide and raffish circle of London friends - Hunt, Haydon, Brown, Hazlitt, Lamb, Reynolds, Severn and all the others - makes us see the poet from multiple angles, in all his fierce contradictions, so sympathetic and so strangely modern.' - Richard Holmes, author of "The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science"