William Hazlitt's tough, combative writings on subjects ranging from slavery to the imagination, boxing matches to the monarchy, established him as one of the greatest radicals of his age and have inspired journalists and political satirists ever since.

William Hazlitt (1778-1830) developed a variety of identities as a writer: essayist, philosopher, critic of literature, drama, and painting, biographer, political commentator, and polemicist. What unites this variety is his dramatic and passionate intelligence, his unswerving commitment to individual and political liberty, and his courageous opposition to established political and cultural power. Hailed in 1819 as `one of the ablest and most eloquent critics of our nation', Hazlitt was also reviled for his political radicalism by the conservative press of the period. His writing engages with many of the important cultural and political debates of a revolutionary period, and retains its power both to provoke and move the reader.

William Hazlitt is England's greatest essayist. He was also a philosopher, a painter, a controversialist and a radical, whose critical writings about literature, the theatre and art were ardently admired in his day. He is the author of the first confessional autobiography of sexual passion, a biographer of Napoleon, a friend of, and profound influence upon, Keats, Stendhal, and Charles Lamb, a friend and later enemy of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and De Quincy, and a key figure in the intellectual life of Regency England. His life was lived against the backdrop of the French Revolution and subsequent Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, with their associated political and literary radicalism in England.

In this collection of Hazlitt's city essays, characters from the Regency spring to life: Wordsworth and Byron; sportsmen and dandies; street jugglers and footmen and coffee house bores.