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The first Cambridge spy John Gross praises this evocation of Christopher Marlowe's shady world and sparkling genius

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From: The Sunday Telegraph London
Date: 20040509
Author:JOHN GROSS

The World of Christopher Marlowe

by David Riggs

Faber, pounds 25, 411 pp

pounds 23 ( pounds 2.25 p&p) 0870 155 7222

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE lived a colourful life and died a violent death. He sounds like a gift to biographers. But there is one snag. The memoirs, diaries, letters and eye-witness accounts on which a biographer normally relies aren't there (as they would certainly have been if he had lived in later times).

This is not to say that a good deal of scattered documentation hasn't survived, especially in connection with Marlowe's brushes with the law, or that many of his contemporaries ...

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