Rosemary Ashton

Rosemary Ashton explores the many facets of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's complex personality, by turns poet, critic, thinker, enchanting companion, feckless husband, fabled conversationalist, and guilt-ridden opium addict. Coleridge's personality was strange and fabulous, as well as being deeply flawed. With subtlety and sensitivity, Ashton explores his complex character, demonstrating how Coleridge's writings in verse and prose are especially expressive of...

One Hot Summer offers a unique, colourful view of Victorian London when residents, both famous and now-forgotten, endured "the Great Stink" across one hot summer. While 1858 in London may have been noteworthy for its broiling summer months and the related stench of the sewage-filled Thames River, the year is otherwise little remembered. And yet, historian Rosemary Ashton reveals in...