Daisy Hay’s Dinner with Joseph Johnson was published in 2022. She teaches at Exeter.
In the autumn of 1777, as the American War ground on, Charles James Fox paid his first visit to the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire at Chatsworth. The young duchess was captivated by her new house guest. His conversation, Georgiana told her mother, ‘is like a brilliant player at billiards, the strokes follow one another piff paff’. For his part, Fox was enamoured of his hostess...
In my teens I walked to school each day past a red pillar box on Banbury Road in Oxford, said to have been installed by the Royal Mail to ease the labours of James Murray at the helm of the Oxford English Dictionary. With a magnificent incuriosity, I never thought to wonder at the strangeness of a post box positioned to enable a dictionary – it was simply where I deposited weekly...
For Joseph Johnson, who was often described as being quiet at his own table, Henry Fuseli perhaps fulfilled that social role best described as ‘the unacceptable friend’, saying what Johnson could or...
I first heard of Benjamin Disraeli in a school assembly when I was ten or eleven. Our headmaster also taught history, and though he was known to us mainly as an expert in horse-drawn...
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