During his own lifetime Benjamin Constant was known as a political theorist, as the courageous defender of liberal causes, and as a notable historian of the religious experience of mankind. Through his journals, autobiographical works and correspondence - documents largely unknown to his contemporaries - subseqent generations have discovered in Constant a fascinating and highly complex personality and have seen in Adolphe one of the greatest French novels of psychological analysis. In recent decades a number of private archives have become accessible to scholars for the first time, and this has brought to light important documents by and relating to Constant. Drawing on material from these sources, much of it hitherto unpublished, Dennis Wood's biography offers a fresh assessment of Constant the writer and the man, laying particular stress on his early experiences. He closely relates the development of his political thought and his passionate interest in the history of religion to his work as novelist and self-analyst. Dennis Wood has drawn together the considerable findings of modern scholarship in this biography, presenting a lively and sympathetic portrait of the most eloquent of all defenders of freedom and privacy'(Sir Isaah Berlin).