This book begins bravely, and in my opinion, more or less rightly. Pamela Edwards asserts that Coleridge was neither a ‘Young Radical’ nor an ‘Old Tory’, that never being a party man, he was never an apostate; or to paraphrase Stuart Andrews’ words, Coleridge was much less radical in his youth and much more radical in his maturity than received opinion has allowed. It is a well-produced volume, with nine provocatively titled chapters (repeated both in the page headings and the notes, so one knows exactly where one is when looking up a reference), buttressed by an introduction and a conclusion. All in all a good-looking book set fair to fulfil its promises. Coleridge the liberal is the thesis of the book, and the introduction develops the notion of organic liberalism, asserting that ‘Coleridge believed that the common law and the ancient constitution revealed, through an ongoing adjustment and accommodation of social and political will, the workings of reason and providence.’ (p. 2) A reasonable generalisation, but I would have liked a reference—and of course, since it is Coleridge, is it ‘reason’ or ‘Reason’? It's not quite clear, nor is it quite clear that the distinction, and its significance, has occurred to the author. Still, that generalisation carries us on to a rapid review of those who have made Coleridge into a political apostate: cited are Hazlitt, De Quincey (spelt variously on the same page—DeQuincey, DeQuincy—but never correctly), Norman Fruman, E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and Marilyn Butler; the last three have all ‘approached the cultural politics of this period through the lens of Marx-influenced ideologies, whether economic reductionism or Gramiscian hegemony theory’ (p. 5). Interesting, and I can see where the author is coming from, but I wonder whether that triumvirate would agree. But if ‘Gramiscian hegemony theory’ is beginning to make me feel a tad ignorant, worse is to follow. A rapid historiography of the period raps out a multitude of names with which I have no familiarity at all—John Cannon, H. T. Dickinson, J. G. A. Pocock, Caroline Robbins, C. B. Macpherson and Bernard Bailyn, whose works are all dealt with in single sentences, but who have all considered Coleridge the radical ‘with an evener temper’—slightly troublesome English, but a remarkable series of summaries: is this the fate of even the best of us—years of work stuffed into a single sentence? John Morrow is given at least a page here, and more in the next chapter, in conjunction with the slightly patronising comment that ‘Some of the best works on Coleridge have, arguably, been produced by the meticulous editors of the Bollingen collected works’ (p. 7). Close reading of the text is always a good way to start a careful study. But those literary readers of Coleridge's political works who haven't kept pace ‘with the changing face of debate in historiography …’ are now beginning to feel a bit dazed. Fortunately, after another short roll-call (Miller, Skinner, Tuck; Winch) the introduction ends.