Hazlitt and Lamb: Spirits of the Age

It is a particular honour to give the Hazlitt Open Lecture. I have been coming to the Hazlitt day school for many years, and it brings back before me my early twenties, when I was just starting out as a graduate student, seventeen years ago, setting off to St Catherine’s College, to hear Uttara Natarajan and Duncan Wu and Tom Paulin launch into their Hazlittian subjects. But I don’t think I fully appreciated, reading the essays the first time around as an undergraduate and in my early twenties, the way in which they are such profound meditations on the strangeness of time and the way we constantly live through our past in our present.