- Critical Lives: Byron (Reaktion Book, 2023).
- Blasted with Antiquity (The Lutterworth Press, 2023).
- The Comic in Shakespeare (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022).
- Perfidious Albion: The Story of Stendhal and British Culture (Edward Everett Root Publishers, 2018).
- Love and Sex in D. H. Lawrence (Clemson University Press, 2015).
- Frank Cioffi: The philosopher in shirt-sleeves (Bloomsbury, 2015).
- Memoirs of a Leavisite: The decline and fall of 'Cambridge English' (Liverpool University Press, 2013). Long-listed for the J. R. Ackerley prize for autobiography.
- The truth about William Shakespeare (Edinburgh University Press, 2012).
- Byron in Geneva: That Summer of 1816 (Liverpool University Press, 2011).
- Death and the Author: How D. H. Lawrence died, and was remembered (Oxford University Press, 2008).
- Shakespeare's Practical Jokes: an introduction to the comic in his work (Associated University Presses, 2007).
- That Man Shakespeare (Helm Information, 2005).
- Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding (Edinburgh University Press, February 2000).
- D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game (Cambridge University Press, 1998). 780pp. This third volume of the Cambridge biography of Lawrence was short-listed for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
