"Pushkin: the Man and his Age" is not a bad biography, though not stellar either. What is good is that it presents Pushkin's life in context with the historical events going on in Russia (the author is, according to the book blurb, an authority on Russian history and culture).
On the bad side is the abundance of typos whenever Russian texts appear. The author included many poems and excerpts of longer poems in Russian, followed by an English (prose) translation. The problem is that there is barely a single poem that is not filled with mistakes that could have easily been prevented if only the publisher had hired a literate Russian to proofread the Russian, or at the very least, the author himself should have proofread the Russian texts -- or maybe he doesn't know Russian? Which may be why one doesn't get a sense in the book of what made Pushkin's writing so extraordinary and beloved.
Presumably, the author was writing for a British reading public because all his comparisons (historical and social) are with English examples. Some of those references-names, events, etc., are not elucidated and are assumed to be common knowledge which they often were not to a non-Brit and they distracted from the main subject. ( )