A stunning work of biographical scholarship and historical imagination,.As a delinquent schoolboy Arthur Rimbaud set the model of the behaviour that would characterise the rest of his life - casting off each new identity he adopted, he exploded all that was fixed around him. In the same way Graham Robb's brilliant biography moves Rimbaud on from his perpetual adolescence where our imaginations have held him to show the extent of his transformations. We follow his progress to Paris and then London: his reinvention of poetry, and his violent love affair with Verlaine. Finally Robb places Rimbaud's African years firmly in context.Robb's Rimbaud is a shocking and exhilarating biographical journey through three continents and many different identities: the Bohemian poet in Victorian London, the mercenary in Java, the gun-runner and explorer in East Africa. By allowing the boy poet to grow up, Robb casts his later years in an entirely new light.