''A nourishing, occasionally provoking hybrid of group biography, cultural criticism and travelogue that seeks to restore to Romanticism its radicalism, and also show just how much the countryside shaped its manifesto'' Hephzibah Anderson, Mail on Sunday
We think we know the Romantic countryside: that series of picturesque landscapes familiar from paintings, poems and music that are still part of Britain''s idea of itself today.
But for the Romantics themselves, the countryside was a place where radical change was underway both within and around them. ''Romanticism isn''t a cultural artefact; it''s a way for thought to move,'' writes highly acclaimed biographer and poet Fiona Sampson in this transporting and vividly evocative book, in which she spends a year walking in the Romantics'' footsteps, from Kent to Kintyre. Setting out across ten landscapes, as the Romantics once did as they wrote, travelled, settled, or tried to define the rural environm
