Tag: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Notes from the Library: “The Life of Thomas Cooper written by Himself” (1872) | Stephen Basdeo

Thomas Cooper the Chartist as pictured on Reynolds's Political instructor (image owner Stephen Basdeo)

How amazing it would be, Cooper mused, if we could trace our every single thought over our whole lifetimes. Yet he knew that such a thing wasn’t possible and that autobiographies shouldn’t necessarily be relied on to tell the whole truth, and this was one such question which bothered him as an autobiographer

Opium; or, How it Became a “Dirty Drug”

We live in an era in which, increasingly, governments in many western countries are realising that they are losing the so-called “War on Drugs”. Some countries have completely decriminalised certain substances, while in some states in the USA, you can buy marijuana over the counter for both medicinal and recreational use. Our attitude to illicit substances is increasingly looking not too dissimilar from that held by many people in the early nineteenth century.