British salons, with guests such as Byron, Moore, and Thackeray, were veritable hothouses of political and cultural agitation. Using a number of sources - diaries, letters, silver-fork novels, satires, travel writing, Keepsakes, and imaginary conversations - Schmid paints a vivid picture of the British salon between the 1780s and the 1840s.

Susanne Schmid teaches at Mainz University, Germany. She has published several books, among the Helene Richter-prize winning Shelley's German Afterlives (2007), as well as articles on Romanticism, film studies, and cultural studies.