William Hazlitt was born in Maidstone, Kent in 1778, the son of a Unitarian minister. He was educated at the Unitarian college in Hackney from 1793 to 1795, and began to move in the political and literary circles of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb and Godwin. His works on literature include the Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817), dedicated to Lamb and admired by Keats. His Political Essays were published in 1819, and Table Talk in 1821-2. In 1825 and 1826 much of his best work was collected in two volumes of essays, The Spirit of the Age and The Plain Speaker. In the last ten years of his life Hazlitt experienced emotional turmoil and poverty, although he continued to publish until his death in 1830.Gregory Dart was educated at Clare College Cambridge where he gained both his BA and his PhD. He taught English Literature at York University from 1993 to 2000 and is now teaching the same subject at University College London. He is the author of Unrequited Love: On Stalking and Being Stalked (2000).