Leo Tolstoy: Childhood, Boyhood, Youth [2012] paperback DUBLI There was a crooked man

There was a crooked man and he walked a crooked mile

but his extraordinary experiences propel him from the high seas to Lord Chancellor

Billy bolts from his office in a panic

millions of desert locusts

Symmons draws on the most recent scholarship and on rediscovered works to create a comprehensive portrait of this complex artist that is perfectly up-to-date and highly absorbing

Leo Tolstoy: Childhood, Boyhood, Youth [2012] paperback DUBLI There was a crooked manLeo Tolstoy began his trilogy, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, in his early twenties. Although he would in his old age famously dismiss it as an 'awkward mixture of fact and fiction', generations of readers have not agreed, finding the novel to be a charming and insightful portrait of inner growth against the background of a world limned with extraordinary clarity, grace and colour. Evident too in its brilliant account of a young person's emerging