Shelley and Byron defended and practiced vegetarianism. At the time they were called "Pythagoreans" (the word “vegetarian” appeared in the 1840's). They integrated their vegetarianism into a broader philosophy inherited from the Enlightenment, where eating meat was associated with aristocratic gluttony and consumerism, as well as

Water symbolism occurs throughout this chapter: Shelley pursuing Rousseau's lovers on Lake Geneva or Rousseau himself hiding out on St. Petersinsel; Wordsworth lost in the Lake Country; my grandmother born in secret disgrace and borne away downriver. The Serpentine, in Hyde Park, is full of foreign students and

Thomas Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings is by now well known. Technically, the DNA tests of 1998 were inconclusive, but it seems likely the two had a relationship for 38 years and possibly as many as six ("illegitimate") children together. Certainly his contemporaries thought so. Below

In medieval and Renaissance Europe, tinkers and knife grinders, traders in beer and wine, salt and spices, laborers, mendicant priests, pilgrims and preachers, outlaws and bandits, highwaymen and renegade soldiers, minstrels, acrobats, dancers and healers were everywhere. They still are if you look, but that is another story. It was

Wordsworth spent most of his life in or near the Lake District in Cumbria. He was born in Cockermouth near the coast and his mother's family were in Penrith. The portrait below by William Shuter of the 28-year-old Wordsworth is from 1798 and the following year he moved