Publisher's Synopsis
The winner of a 1988 Somerset Maugham Award, this is a kaleidoscopic series of portraits from an era of tumultuous change in Europe as it was experienced and communicated by the writers of the age - not only the more familiar "Romantic" figures such as Coleridge and Shelley, Byron and Goethe, but also Chenier, Hoelderlin, Hoffman, Madame de Stael, Pushkin and others. It is set against the background of the initial liberal dawning the the French Revolution seemed to herald, and the disillusion that set in after its descent into terror, and the decades of warfare that followed.
