This is an excellent little book. It serves as an introduction to the lives of the Romantic Poets and their circle - each short biography no more than three pages - and the reproductions of paintings in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery are first class. What I found particularly good was that this format allowed the reader to link the lives of these characters, all of whom were born between 1756 and 1797, many of them flourishing in the time of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars and most of them in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The last of the eighteen principal subjects died in 1864. ( )

Holmes at his most aphoristic, even-handed and kaleidoscopic, offering up tantalizing cameos of the poets, painters, essayists and actors of the English Romantic Period, with special attention to the rise of Romantic portraiture as reflected in the extraordinary collection of London's National Portrait Gallery. ( )