William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man - Hardcover

This biography is a fluent and impassioned defence of Hazlitt against his detractors. (Ronan McDonald, The Observer)

A winning combination of scholarly rigour and narrative panache. (The Independent on Sunday. Jonathan Wright.)

This is a tanalising and revealing picture of William Hazlitt. (Irish Times. Anne Haverty.)

Wu's detective work generally provides dividends...the biography gives us an excellent sense of the range of Hazlitt's commitment and contacts. (London Review of Books, Matthew Bevis)

Wu is the foremost authority on Hazlitt and makes a worthwhile case for Hazlitt as an essayist very much superior to Lamb and De Quincey. (The Times)

A much needed concise, clear and readable account. (Sarah Burton Matthew, The Independent)

I greatly enjoyed this major new biography... an exceptional study. (Times Higher Education)

'plenty to savour' (LRB)

Wu's biography is, like its subject, passionately partisan. (Sunday Times)

Duncan Wu's portrait of William Hazlitt - covering Hazlitt's entire life - reveals one of the greatest journalists in the language, and the principal spokesman of the Romantic age, interacting with every major writer and many other movers and shakers of the era.