Jon Cook Knihy

When William Hazlitt moved into 9 Southampton Buildings, Holborn, England, in August 1820, little did he know that his life would soon be turned upside down. On meeting 19-year-old Sarah Walker, his new landlady's daughter, as she served him breakfast on his first morning, he conceived a deep infatuation. The intensity of this obsession would eventually lead him to divorce his wife and write the most controversial book of his career, Liber Amoris . Passion, intrigue, love, and deception come together in this intoxicating account of a wild and romantic chapter in the life of a genius.

William Hazlitt (1778-1830) developed a variety of identities as a writer: essayist, philosopher, critic of literature, drama, and painting, biographer, political commentator, and polemicist. What unites this variety is his dramatic and passionate intelligence, his unswerving commitment to individual and political liberty, and his courageous opposition to established political and cultural power. Hailed in 1819 as `one of the ablest and most eloquent critics of our nation', Hazlitt was also reviled for his political radicalism by the conservative press of the period. His writing engages with many of the important cultural and political debates of a revolutionary period, and retains its power both to provoke and move the reader.