It's easy to see why Victor Hugo won the 1997 Whitbread Biography Award. Unintimidated by the epic sweep of Victor Hugo's life (1802-85), British scholar Graham Robb analyzes it with intelligence, wit, and enormous verve. The author wears his learning lightly as he cherry-picks the vast Hugo archives to cogently chronicle his subject's evolution from leading poet of the Romantic revolution (Hernani) to passionate novelist of the downtrodden (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) to majestic political exile (The Chastisements), thundering against the tyranny of Louis-Napoleon from the Channel Islands. Victor Hugo is a stimulating, opinionated reassessment of France's most monumental writer.