The author of Gulliver’s Travels was a man of contradictions: a conservative at war with authority, a church minister in love with a married woman, and a satirist both fascinated and despairing of by the world. This biography follows his flight from war-torn Ireland in 1688 to the splendour and squalor of London, examining his shifting political allegiances and complicated love life to identify the roots of the ‘savage indignation’ that drove him.