Sultry Month

As London swelters in a heatwave - sunstroke strikes, meat rots, ice is coveted - a glamorous coterie of writers and artists spend their summer wining, dining and opining.

With the ringletted 'face of an Egyptian cat goddess', Elizabeth Barrett is courted by her secret fiancé, the poet Robert Browning, who plots their elopement to Italy;

Reviews

'Hayter's clever, innovative book turned a searchlight on a time, a place, a circle of people; it has surely inspired the subsequent fashion for group biographies.' Penelope Lively

'Nothing I've ever read has flung me so immediately into those streets, that weather, that period. Hayter never forgets that people want stories, that lives are stories.' Margaret Forster

'Hayter could take a tiny chip of life [and] find within it the seeds of a whole existence.' Richard Holmes

'A pioneer . . . Beautifully written vignettes . . . Immaculate scholarship and intense readability.' Jonathan Bate

'Outstanding . . . A small masterpiece.' Anthony Burgess