I wish I had thought of the title of this review, but it is Katherine Rundell’s phrase, and it encapsulates the aim of her new biography Super-Infinite: to follow the changes of role and personality that took John Donne from a childhood and youth shaped by his Catholicism, via an impulsive clandestine marriage, social disgrace, repeated professional disappointments, and multiple illnesses and bereavements, to the exalted position of Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral. Rundell is something of a transformational character herself; there cannot be many Fellows of All Souls, “home of the incurably bookish” as she describes it, whose hobbies include tightrope-walking (also, metaphorically, practiced by Donne) and rooftop-climbing. In addition, she is the author of several novels for children, so she knows how to tell a story briskly and crisply (if, at times, a little too chattily).

There is certainly quite a story to tell, and it has been told variously by Donne’s previous biographers. For Izaak Walton (1670) it was a tale of exemplary piety; for R. C. Bald (1970) a collection of facts to be sorted, organized, and preserved in an academic bell jar; for John Carey (1981) a study in hypocrisy and apostasy; for John Stubbs (2007) a sincere conversion narrative. For Rundell it is the story of a mind and an imagination, which she variously characterizes as “galvanizing,” “strange and labyrinthical,” and “cacophonous”: a mind that could conceive of eternity, in a sermon, as “super-infinite forevers.” “I am a little world made