Liber Amoris

William Hazlitt was born in Maidstone, Kent in 1778, the son of a Unitarian minister.After a short period in America, the family settled in the village of Wem, Shropshire.Hazlitt was educated at the Unitarian college in Hackney from 1793 to 1795, although he decided against the religious life, and began to move in the political and literary circles of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb and Godwin.He wrote philosophy and politics before becoming increasingly involved in literature and journalism.In 1814 he became the Morning Chronicle parliamentary reporter and theatre critic, while also writing essays for journals, including the Edinburgh Review and Leigh Hunt's Examiner.His works on literature include the Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817), dedicated to Lamb and admired by Keats; Lectures on the English Poets (1818); The Round Table, in collaboration with Leigh Hunt (1818); and Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819).His Political Essays were also published in 1819, and Table Talk in 1821-2.In 1825 and 1826 much of his best work was collected in two volumes of essays, The Spirit of the Age and The Plain Speaker.In the Last ten years of his life hazlitt experienced emotional turmoil and poverty, although he continued to publish until his death in 1830. Gregory Dart was educated at Clare College Cambridge where he gained both his BA and his PhD. He taught English Literature at York University from 1993 to 2000 and is now teaching the same subject at University College London. He is the author of Unrequited Love: On Stalking and Being Stalked (2000).

Best books...Dan Cruickshank, the architechtural historian and television presenter, chooses his five favourite books.Liber AmorisThis astonishing biographical tale about Hazlitt's infatuation with his landlord's daughter is honest to the point of self-destruction. Hazlitt charts, analyses but can't escape the passion he feels for a woman far younger. The novel plunged Hazlitt into social disgrace and remains a breathtaking portrait of a man on the abyss of emotional collapse.