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“... and excuse for the output – or lack of it – in these writers. It is also possible, and Grevel Lindop suggests this in his new biography, that the drug is wryly irrelevant to the work: that it doesn’t explain very much. And doubting drugs need not be confined to doubting their part in the creative life. Like Hogg, another grinder of literary ...”

“... he found doing shorter pieces to strict editorial deadlines a godsend. De Quincey frequented what Grevel Lindop calls ‘the fluid frontier between the academic and the journalistic worlds’ of early 19th-century Edinburgh and London, though he had little time for Scottish professors. Indeed De Quincey, and Blackwood’s Magazine, seem to ...”

“... a series of books by young poets gravitating towards the idea of travel. Of those under review, Grevel Lindop’s Tourists is the most transparently accomplished. Lucid of contour, with a syntax almost too elegiacally attuned to form, his work displays, even when not concerned with journeying, the kind of internal ‘itinerary’ which (in ...”

“... world. To all those he influenced, Williams stood as a symbol of undaunted integrity. What Grevel Lindop’s excellent new biography exposes, with all too disturbing force, is just how compromised he was. He came from a very ordinary lower-middle-class family. He was born in 1886 near the Holloway Road, not far from where the Pooters famously ...”

“... Quincey’s works that emerged in 2000-3, to which he contributed under the general editorship of Grevel Lindop. But the problem with cradle to grave biographies of De Quincey has never been paucity of material; rather, it’s the way it’s distributed across his long and often tedious life. On the crucial formative episodes, his youthful adventures in ...”

“... debts. Things improved steadily when his daughter Margaret took over the running of the household. Grevel Lindop, the general editor of The Works of Thomas De Quincey, speaks in The Opium-Eater, his 1981 biography, of De Quincey’s ‘curious optimism’ and his capacity for feats of sustained creative work. For all his sickly appearance, his ...”