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“... repudiating them. Academic critics are often enamoured of Wordsworth’s youthful allegiances. Kenneth Johnston’s The Hidden Wordsworth is almost mystically committed to the idea of his youth. Its prologue declares that, with all the reverence (and matching irreverence) the poet has inspired, there is one image, or story, that we have not seen ...”

“... the war and to fix a French taint to the movement to reform a thoroughly corrupt parliament. Kenneth Johnston’s Unusual Suspects are men and women who fell foul of ‘Pitt’s determination to crush his domestic opponents’ and whose lives, careers, reputations were irrevocably damaged as a result. They were members of a brilliant generation of ...”

“... Andrew Motion speculates that ‘Keats may have gone to brothels in Oxford and London’, and that Kenneth Johnston draws attention to ‘the realities of Cambridge between 1787 and 1791’ while Wordsworth was there. So there was a lot of it about. Wu’s initial claim about these individuals – presented as fact in the main text – lacks proper ...”

“... grateful for Taylor’s good opinion; and Coleridge, he assured Taylor, was properly penitent. As Kenneth Johnston has written: ‘If one were trying to cover over traces of youthful Jacobinism, what better way than to send a book of reformed poems to a potentially virulent enemy, and then follow it up with a fawning reply agreeing with his strictures ...”

“... non-resignations can in many ways be as disgraceful as resignations. The leading figure here is Kenneth Baker, who perfected a theory about why he should slay as Home Secretary despite the succession of calamities that surrounded him, until he was eventually jettisoned by the Prime Minister after the 1992 election. Holding steadfastly to the view that ...”

“... In Berkeley, he took classes with the historian Ernst Kantorowicz, became friends with the poets Kenneth Rexroth and Robin Blaser, and formed an intense alliance with Jack Spicer that set the stage for the San Francisco Renaissance and later curdled into an open and often hostile rivalry. During one energetic six-month period he met or made contact with ...”