John Milton was born in London on December 9, 1608, and studied at the University of Cambridge. He originally planned to become a clergyman, but abandoned those ambitions to become a poet. Political in his writings, he served a government post during the time of the Commonwealth. By 1660, he was completely blind but continued to write, finishing Paradise Lost in 1667, and Paradise Regained in 1671. He died in 1674Biographer Claire Tomalin was born in London in 1933. She is the author of highly acclaimed biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft, Katherine Mansfield and Jane Austen. Her biography of the seventeenth-century diarist Samuel Pepys (2002) won the the Samuel Pepys Award, and the 2002 Whitbread Book of the Year award. Claire Tomalin lives in London with her husband, the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn.