JOHN WYATT was Principal of two Colleges of Higher Education from 1971 to his retirement in 1996, when he became Visiting Professor at the University of Southampton in the Faculty of Education and Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of East London. He was Council Member and Honorary Treasurer of the Society for Research into Higher Education and in 1997 was elected Fellow of the Society. He is a Trustee of the Higher Education Foundation. He writes on the history and philosophy of higher education and on management in that sector, in addition to the studies of Wordsworth and his geological friends, Charlotte Smith, the sonneteer, and the literary and scientific culture of early nineteenth-century Britain.