Unusual Suspects

Unusual Suspects tells the fascinating lost stories of the right people in the right place at the wrong time: liberal intellectuals in 'free-born' Britain during a decade when its politicians led it into a panic of 'Alarm' cynically manipulating fears that the spectre of Terror would descend upon it from France. Comparisons between Pitt and Robespierre were common at the time, made by Coleridge and Wordsworth, among others. But most of these weresuppressed after 1798, from well-justified fears of reprisals. The significant loss to British literature and to British culture generally by the erasure of this brilliant emergent generation-that did notemerge-cannot be accurately measured, but Unusual Suspects indicates some of the directions this 'other Romanticism' might have taken. Parallels with our own era's 'war on terror' will immediately come to readers' minds. Biographical accounts of twenty representative writers reveal the larger outlines of Britain's first 'lost generation.'