Break-ups had happened before of course. Henry VIII's split from the Vatican comes to mind, or Socrates' spat with the Athenian state, but this is the break-up over which we still take sides. Even ...

If it weren’t for “Brown Eyed Girl,” sad to say, Van Morrison wouldn’t get any radio airplay at all nowadays. That’s why only the cognoscenti know that Van the Man finds inspiration in the writings of ...

In Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, Richard Holmes described how, aged 18, he followed the route taken by Robert Louis Stevenson and his donkey almost 100 years earlier as they walked ...

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or ...

What would that biography be like which managed to include every surviving record of a life? Every document, letter and journal entry? Every encounter, known movement, illustration? What we might call ...

We, who are alive, hardly know when we are happy. We are always looking ahead, thinking, or at least hoping, that “the best is yet to be.“ When we ponder and judge the lives of dead men, we say to ...

Frank Skinner and Denise Mina are hitting the road to explore William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Frank adores the verse of Wordsworth and focuses on what made William tick. Denise, the ...

Amid the idyllic landscape of the Lake District lived three poet patres familias – the now all but forgotten poet laureate Robert Southey; the heir to Milton, William Wordsworth; and his friend and ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. In 1797, Wordsworth and his adored sister Dorothy lived for a little over a year as Somerset neighbours to ...