A writer at war with the world

THE QUARREL OF THE AGE: The Life and Times of William Hazlitt by AC Grayling (Weidenfeld, 25) CLAIRE HARMAN

T left an extraordinary description of his friend Hazlitt playing rackets: the famous essayist tore about the court with his shirt off, throwing himself against the walls, shouting and swearing "until he lashed himself up into a desperation, and looked more like a savage animal than anything human". The seriousness with which he undertook even a game was typical: William Hazlitt was a ferociously competitive man, not content with winning, but always bent on crushing the opposition.

"The opposition" included monarchs, tyranny, the established church, the status quo, women, in-laws and sometime best friends.

Wordsworth and Coleridge had both befriended Hazlitt when he was struggling to establish himself, but no sense of auld lang syne prevented their prot"g" from demolishing them in print at a later date. The two great poets had embodied the revolutionary spirit for Hazlitt in the 1790s and he was disgusted by their gradual assimilation into the Establishment. Hazlitt kept the quarrel going for years, pre-emptively "reviewing" one of Coleridge's pamphlets before it was even written, and making it the excuse for a full- scale ad hominem attack.

Wordsworth also came in for harsh criticism for the "egotism" he displayed in The Excursion, though Wordsworth was canny enough to see the review's publicity value: "It must benefit the sale of the book," he told Dorothy.

"The Dog writes strong."

AC Grayling's comprehensive new study of Hazlitt shows the origins of this "genius for contempt" in a long history of disappointment with him- self and others. Hazlitt was the son of a Unitarian minister and an unusually serious child, who enjoyed discussing the Test Act and listening to sermons.

He was "forward", antisocial and judgmental and studied so hard that he suffered what sounds like a sort of breakdown in his student years, when he lost his faith. There were years of struggle to make a living as a lecturer and portrait painter (at which he had real talent) while his secret ambition, to win fame as a metaphysician, bubbled away in the background. It took 10 years for Hazlitt to formulate the argument of An Essay on Human Action, but it failed to impress many people in 1803, and despite the careful explanation and defence here by Grayling (a professional philosopher), it remains most remarkable as a display of intellectual pride.

Hazlitt's fortunes turned when he became a journalist in 1812, working first as a Parliamentary reporter, then as theatre critic and later essayist and commentator on almost any topic he chose. As Grayling demonstrates, Hazlitt was the most powerful writer of his day in a bullish market; the Champion, the Examiner and the Edinburgh Review paid serious money to keep him, in work or out. But despite his success, he remained embittered most of the time, devastated by the defeat of his hero Napoleon and the "apostacy" of his former friends.

Being embittered became his stock-in-trade and "Vindex" his pseudonym.

Though he constantly demanded the quality of "gusto" in other people's art, drama and literature, he never seemed capable of rustling it up himself when attempting to praise his contemporaries.

AC Grayling is his temperamental opposite, cool and dry, a trustworthy if slightly colourless guide. He favours a hands-off approach and lets his subject speak in huge slabs of quotation. Unfortunately, the quotations are both too long and never enough, as Hazlitt's essays are too carefully constructed to bear much cutting. And what Grayling really feels about Hazlitt beyond admiration is hard to tell.

Hazlitt left few personal letters or diaries, which makes his inner life hard to fathom - on the whole.

There is a single notable exception, his Liber Amoris, published in 1823, one of the most uncomfortable confessional memoirs in the language, in which Hazlitt exposed every last detail of a humiliating infatuation with his landlord's daughter, Sally Walker.

Mistaking Sally's coy flirting for modesty, Hazlitt went to the lengths of getting a "Scottish divorce" from his wife in order to pursue the girl, only to have it proved, by painful degrees, that she was "as common as the stairs".

The details of the disastrous affair are well known; less so the prolonged aftermath in which Hazlitt was still watching Sally's door a year later and "felt much like a man who has been thrown from the top of a house". Perhaps the "individual scowler" and scourge of the age was the most profoundly Romantic of them all.

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