Wu's biography is, like its subject, passionately partisan.

Duncan Wu is Professor of English at Georgetown University Washington DC. He is a former Fellow of St Catherine's College and Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. His previous books include Wordsworth: An Inner Life (2000), and Romanticism: An Anthology, a standard text now in its third edition. He is the editor of Selected Writings of William Hazlitt (9 vols, 1998), William Hazlitt, The Plain Speaker: Key Essays (1998), (with Tom Paulin and Uttara Natarajan) Metaphysical Hazlitt: Bicentenary Essays (2005), and New Writings of William Hazlitt (2007).