★★★

Hands up, anyone else who hasn’t read Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock? Not just me then. Thank heavens. Mind you, you don’t really need to have read it in order to enjoy this fictionalised account of its creation. Gee brings late Stuart London to life in all its snobbish splendour: here are the coffee houses, the levees and masquerades, the self-obsessed glittering mass of the nobility and the hungry throng of writers snapping at their heels. One of these, hungrier and more ambitious than the rest, is a young Catholic poet named Alexander Pope, who has come to London hoping to make his name.

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