William Hazlitt

Duncan Wu's fascinating portrait of William Hazlitt - the first fully-researched biography, and the first to cover Hazlitt's entire life - reveals one of the greatest journalists in the language, and the principal spokesman of the Romantic age, interacting with every major writer and many other movers and shakers of the era.

Duncan Wu is Professor of English at Georgetown University Washington DC. He is a former Fellow of St Catherine's College and Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. His previous books include Wordsworth: An Inner Life (2000), and Romanticism: An Anthology, a standard text now in its third edition. He is the editor of Selected Writings of William Hazlitt (9 vols, 1998), William Hazlitt, The Plain Speaker: Key Essays (1998), (with Tom Paulin and Uttara Natarajan) Metaphysical Hazlitt: Bicentenary Essays (2005), and New Writings of William Hazlitt (2007).

This biography is a fluent and impassioned defence of Hazlitt against his detractors. Ronan McDonald, The Observer A winning combination of scholarly rigour and narrative panache. The Independent on Sunday. Jonathan Wright. This is a tanalising and revealing picture of William Hazlitt. Irish Times. Anne Haverty. Wu's detective work generally provides dividends...the biography gives us an excellent sense of the range of Hazlitt's commitment and contacts. London Review of Books, Matthew Bevis Wu is the foremost authority on Hazlitt and makes a worthwhile case for Hazlitt as an essayist very much superior to Lamb and De Quincey. The Times A much needed concise, clear and readable account. Sarah Burton Matthew, The Independent I greatly enjoyed this major new biography... an exceptional study. Times Higher Education 'plenty to savour' LRB Wu's biography is, like its subject, passionately partisan. Sunday Times