Tag Archives: Robert Southey

Book review: Albemarle Street: Portraits, personalities and presentations at the Royal Institution

November 4, 2021

Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, United Kingdom   Cover of Albemarle Street: Portraits, personalities and presentations at the Royal Institution by John Meurig Thomas. In this fascinating book, the late Professor Meurig Thomas, a distinguished chemist, former Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge University, and an accomplished popularizer of science, tells the story of one of Britain’s greatest […]

Airs and graces: Humphry Davy and science as performance

September 10, 2021

Alan Bleakley Sennen, West Cornwall, United Kingdom   A cartoon featured in an 1807 dissertation by a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania on the “chemical and exhilarating effects of nitrous oxide gas.” The two figures are almost certainly Davy to the right and perhaps Beddoes to the left. Credit: Bulletin of the Society […]

Coleridge and the albatross syndrome

October 21, 2020

Nicolás Roberto Robles  Badajoz, Spain   Figure 1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Contemporary portrait. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the tenth and last child of the vicar of Ottery Saint Mary near Devonshire, England, was born on October 21, 1772. In vivid letters recounting his early years he describes himself as “a genuine Sans […]