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“... is thirty-eight. When male life expectancy is about forty, this is decline.’ Or about the reason Leigh and John Hunt described the Prince of Wales as ‘a man who has just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country’: Wilson explains in square brackets that George III had been on the ...”

“... of disagreements and misunderstandings, Byron transferred his business to the publisher John Hunt; and finally in the spring of 1824, when Murray presided over the destruction of Byron’s memoirs, which he had not read, in his rooms at 50 Albemarle Street.* Byron was 23 when he wrote his first letter to Murray, in the summer after his return from ...”

“... an heiress. In 1819, aged 33, he surprised everyone by getting a job with the East India Company. Leigh Hunt wrote to Mary Shelley: ‘You have heard, of course, of Peacock’s appointment in the India House; we joke him upon his new Oriental grandeur, his Brahminical learning, and his inevitable tendencies to be one of the corrupt; upon which he seems ...”

“... Heaney land, a place domesticated by poets. Keats said that Hampstead had been ‘damned’ by Leigh Hunt, and the Lakes by Wordsworth. For Larkin elsewhere can only be completely authentic (‘a real girl in a real place’) if    I have never foundThe place where I could sayThis Is my proper ground,Here I shall stay ...The absolute reality of ...”

“... this point, or do enough to investigate the threats and harassment that writers like Cobbett and Leigh Hunt must have incurred for supporting the leader of an enemy power in wartime. But the evidence he presents serves as a vivid and depressing reminder that, in some ways, Britain in the era of Napoleon was more open to genuine, vigorous political ...”

“... more intransigent than less mystic opponents of the Tory war regime. He pursued Robert and Leigh Hunt venomously, for having taken his paintings of Nelson and Pitt to be icons of reaction (a mistake, if it was one – Blake himself never said so – shared by not a few art historians), accusing them of responsibility for a war they were more ...”

“... a more particular example. Shelley’s ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ was first published by Leigh Hunt in the Examiner in January 1817. The poem is placed in the immediate context of a long article dealing with political power and its abuse by the government. As a consequence, the (initial) Examiner text of Shelley’s poem stands in a graphic ...”

“... thus suggests how reading implicates the whole person. Yet there are dangers in promoting touch. Leigh Hunt finely praised ‘Dear Hazlitt, whose tact intellectual is such,/That it seems to feel truth, as pure matter of touch,’ but the Romantic cult of touch as a medium of truth would lead to D.H. Lawrence, a writer with a number of disconcerting ...”

“... failed him.Keats spent his last weeks in England in the care of Mrs Brawne, after fleeing Leigh Hunt’s chaotic hospitality in a rage over the household’s careless treatment of a letter from his painfully beloved Fanny Brawne. But he needed to leave in order to spare her the sight of the horrors he knew were coming for him. Severn’s ...”

“... continued to bring up the question of immaturity or childishness throughout his writing life. Leigh Hunt thought there was ‘a little too much of the spoiled child’ about the poems; and, later still, a spiky Swinburne detected elements of ‘beardless bluster’ and the ‘provincial schoolboy’. Those are remarks about the works, of course, but ...”

“... John Keats was the first great English poet to grow up in the London suburbs, and – aided by Leigh Hunt – to allow his work to speak for his true milieu. Browning’s aesthetic eccentricity might well be called suburbanity, the decision to keep his independence by avoiding a classic centre. And more recently, others besides Larkin and Amis have ...”

“... school, the poetic romances of Keats in it would not have seemed so different from those of Leigh Hunt. Already the pages of Alvarez’s The New Poetry have a dated look, arising not so much from the poems themselves as from their juxtaposition, marshalled, loaded and pointed the same way by their frenetic commander. As anthologist he imposed his ...”

“... preservation of a national culture. Part of the effect of the French Revolution in Britain was, as Leigh Hunt remarked, ‘to endear the nation to its own habits’. Amongst these was a mistrust of rational abstraction and a preference for intuitive, organic development. Led by Coleridge’s organicist political theories transmuted to a theory of ...”

“... Pursuing the truth about the McCarthyite witch-hunt via 17th-century Salem, Arthur Miller was one day transfixed by an etching in a library. It had been made by an eyewitness of the original trials, and showed a bearded judge with arms upraised in horror as he watched a covey of girls screaming and clawing at invisible tormentors ...”

“... I visited​ the set of Mike Leigh’s Peterloo last year. Jacqueline Riding, who was acting as a consultant on the movie and has now written an account of the event it commemorates, showed me round the recreated St Peter’s Field. Actors wore the military regalia of the 15th regiment of hussars and the 13th regiment of foot; there was a wood-panelled room, like the one from which the Manchester magistrates had looked out over the crowd ...”