*Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize* In late eighteenth-century London a group of
extraordinary people gathered around a dining table once a week. The host was Joseph Johnson
publisher and bookseller and he was joined at dinner by a shifting constellation of great minds
including William Blake Samuel Taylor Coleridge William Wordsworth Henry Fuseli Anna
Barbauld and Mary Wollstonecraft. Johnson's years as a maker of books saw profound change in
Britain and abroad. In this remarkable portrait of a revolutionary age Daisy Hay captures a
changing nation through the stories of the men and women who wrote it into being and whose
ideas still influence us today. 'Rich in period and personal detail' Guardian'Hugely
engrossing' Sunday Times
