Amabel Yorke (1751 – 1833) left behind an extensive archive of letters and diaries, carefully documenting her life, her observations, and her strong political opinions. Growing up immersed in a culture of intellectual debate, Amabel longed to participate in political life. She wrote extensively on the French Revolution, and described herself as an old English Whig. Discussed here by Serena Dyer, PhD candidate at the University of Warwick.

Mary Weston was an eighteenth-century Quaker preacher and missionary, who undertook extensive ministerial work in the British Isles and the American Colonies. Ceding domestic responsibilities to a husband was highly unusual for an eighteenth-century woman. This Brief Life therefore intends to contextualise not only the mechanisms of support within Quakerism that were provided for Mary throughout her ministerial career, but also the relationships that developed with her husband and daughter as a result of her frequent calls to ministry.

Elizabeth Helme (1772-c.1810/1813) was an English novelist, translator, educational writer, teacher, and headmistress. Although much of her work did well critically and commercially, since the mid-nineteenth century it has largely been ignored. For more information, please listen to the podcast by Kate Scarth.

George Lord Berkeley was a literary patron, nobleman, occasional sitting peer and fond traveller. Tutored by Dr Philemon Holland, dedicatory of Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, heavily in debt through his adult life, and a minor peer through the turbulent 1640s.

John Morgan, as part of his Undergraduate Research Scholarship Scheme, discusses his life, career, and place within the patronage networks of the early seventeenth century.

“[Callcott] painted everything tolerably, and nothing excellently; he has given us no gift, struck for us no light, and though he has produced one or two valuable works…they will, I believe, in future have no place among those considered representative of the English School."

Carly Collier reacts to Ruskin’s withering assessment of the nineteenth-century landscape painter Augustus Wall Callcott, discussing he and his wife (Lady Maria) as a formidable partnership, counting leading artists, intellectuals and politicians amongst their friends and, c.1828-1842, presiding over arguably the most important artistic salon of the era.