Alethea Hayter Libri

In the spring of 1804, Coleridge sailed to the Mediterranean in the hope of restoring his health, recreating his poetic energies and solving his emotional problems. During the voyage, he kept a very detailed diary, and from this and from his and his friends' letters Alethea Hayter has painted a close-up portrait of Coleridge - both the outer and the inner man - at a comparatively little studied moment of his life, but a pivotal one. It was also an increasingly critical period in the Napoleonic War, and the movements of warships and convoys in the Mediterranean, and the problems of Nelson - personal as well as strategic, and in some ways parallel to Coleridge's - are interwoven with the narrative. Sara Hutchinson, the Wordsworths, Southey, the Lambs and Coleridge's other friends at home are also shown going about their affairs amid their anxieties about him during the six weeks while he travelled through storm and calm to reach an intellectual and emotional destination which was not the one he set out for. As those readers already familiar with Alethea Hayter's work would expect, 'A Voyage in Vain' combines the pleasures of thoroughly researched biography, and criticism and social history, with the narrative sweep of a novel.

Wine and dine with Victorian London's literati in a heatwave in one of the first ever group biographies, introduced by Francesca Wade (author of Square Haunting). Though she loved the heat she could do nothing but lie on the sofa and drink lemonade and read Monte Cristo ... June 1846. As London swelters - sunstroke strikes, meat rots, ice is coveted - a glamorous coterie of writers and artists indulge in decadent parties. With her ringletted 'face of an Egyptian cat goddess', Elizabeth Barrett is courted by her secret fiancé, the poet Robert Browning, who plots their elopement to Italy; Keats roams the Heath; Wordsworth visits the zoo; Dickens is intrigued by Tom Thumb; the Carlyles suffer a marital crisis. But when the visionary painter Benjamin Robert Haydon commits suicide, their lives begin to spiral around the tragedy ... One of the first group biographies, inspired by the "Pop Artists", Althea Hayter's glorious A Sultry Month was a groundbreaking feat of creative non-fiction in 1965 - and as radical today. "An experiment in the art of biography that has [been] never bettered." -- Guardian "A form which was so new as to lack a name ... A masterpiece." -- Anthony Burgess

One of 60 low-priced classic texts published to celebrate Penguin's 60th anniversary. All the titles are extracts from "Penguin Classics" titles.

Offers an account of the pleasures and pains of worshipping at the 'Church of Opium'. This autobiography of addiction hauntingly describes the author's surreal visions and hallucinatory nocturnal wanderings through London, along with the nightmares, despair and paranoia to which he became prey.