The last man who knew everything

From The Week:

It hardly seems likely that the life of an obscure Anglican clergyman should recommend itself to the attention of a modern biographer; the shelves of second-hand bookshops are the sepulchers of many an Essex parson's dutifully compiled Life and Letters. But Sabine Baring-Gould happens to have been the last man who knew everything.

Rebecca Tope, the distinguished crime novelist and independent publisher, begins her fascinating new biography, Sabine Baring-Gould: The Man Who Told a Thousand Stories, by admitting that she does not know how her subject was capable of such impossibly wide learning. The question is very likely unanswerable.

Baring-Gould was a fascinating subject: a man who did everything in excess. He lived to be ninety; he fathered fifteen children; he wrote 130 books; he collected folksongs and wrote hymns. He never ran short of energy. His novels were bestsellers in the final decades of the Victorian era. He was almost never dull, even when writing collections of sermons or Lives of the Saints.