Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt - Tapa blanda

"Roe is an exceptionally shrewd critic of Romanticism - uncannily alert... everything he says is well-turned and reliably clever" (Andrew Motion Guardian)

"Roe provides as complete a portrait as we are likely to get of Hunt’s first 37 years" (Nicholas Shakespeare Daily Telegraph)

"Roe offers a meticulous and thorough account of Hunt’s significance in the literary culture of the Regency era" (Sunday Telegraph)

"Roe is a seasoned Romantic scholar who offers an impassioned account of Hunt's 'first life'" (D J Taylor Sunday Times)

"Roe's biography is an absorbing account of English intellectual culture in the early 19th century" (Evening Standard)

Leigh Hunt is the forgotten giant of English Romanticism. The man Virginia Woolf called the 'spiritual grandfather' of the modern world was descended from black Caribbeans and grew up a child of the American and French revolutions. A poet and radical journalist, he threw off the shackles of the old order and campaigned tirelessly for Irish freedom and the abolition of slavery. Unwilling to see the Prince of Wales as an 'Adonis of Loveliness', Hunt was jailed for 'diabolical libel' that presented the prince as he was: a corpulent fifty-year-old, sodden with drink and drugs.

Hunt was the centre of a charismatic generation. In prison, he drew the homage of Lord Byron, and soon afterwards discovered the Romantic geniuses Keats and Shelley. He was also a man riven by contradicitons, enjoying a controversial public role while battling with private demons. Hunt's own poetry glows with the sexual frankness that characterised all his relationships, male and female.

Written with flair and brilliant imaginative insight, and using a wealth of unpublished manuscript sources, Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt overturns existing accounts and presents a sparkling new portrait of Leigh Hunt and the English Romantics.