William Hazlitt believed in the passion of the moment, the spontaneous, in art, something he termed "gusto". It was a quality that distinguished his own writing, but that also could be applied to his fatal flaw, an inability to distinguish love from lust in his personal life. Philosopher A.C. Grayling proves remarkably well attuned to both the abstract and the earthy in his subject's life. Midwife to the birth of Romanticism (he knew the young Wordsworth and Coleridge, who told him he had guts in his brains), Hazlitt was at first a talented portrait painter. It was not until his 30s that he was to "decline into a journalist", albeit the first major theatre reviewer, and a dissenting political journalist who would become possibly the second-greatest English essayist, after his friend Charles Lamb.Appropriate to his early career, he wrote pen portraits of the leading figures of the time in Spirit of the Age, which along with the Selected Writings still bear a wit and precocity that delights his many admirers, who include Michael Foot and Tom Paulin. "Essay on the Principles of Human Action" proclaimed his belief in the ultimate altruism of man, rejecting the Hobbesian notion of selfishness in an argument that anticipated contemporary debate. Despite his talents, he still contrived to be his own worst enemy, being addicted both to prostitutes and the habit of love at first sight. When he died in 1830, aged only 52, he had destroyed much of his reputation with Liber Amoris, which detailed his infatuation with Sarah Walker, the 19-year-old daughter of his boarding-house keeper. This obsessional streak, part of an inability to compromise which gave rise to a lifelong admiration for Napoleon and advocacy of the ideas of the French Revolution, saw him grow even more radical with age, as the Romantic poets embraced more conservative values. Grayling's careful reading will not please everyone, but he writes with exemplary clarity and insight of a brilliant writer and a difficult life. —David Vincent
