THE LAST LEOPARD: A Life of Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa - Softcover

David Gilmour's biography of Giuseppe di Lampedusa unearths the life story of the creator of "The Leopard", one of the great novels of the twentieth century. A book whose imagery, once tasted, haunts the reader forever. "The Leopard" describes the golden era of the nineteenth-century Sicily in all its sensual, fading, aristocratic glory. But beneath the surface lurk Sicily's millenial contagions - corruption, brutality and inequality. Who wrote this masterpiece, this work of art? the answer is as unlikely as one might hope. This is a fascinating meditation on what it is that makes a writer.

David Gilmour's books include award-winning biographies of Rudyard Kipling and Lord Curzon. He is also the author of 'The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj' and of several books on Spain and the Middle East. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a former Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, he is a contributor to the Spectator and the New York Review of Books. He is currently writing a book on Giuseppe Verdi and the unification of Italy.

The Last Leopard won the Marsh Biography Award in 1989.