For up to seven years, De Quincey was “in and out of sanctuary,” squatting all over Edinburgh to avoid not only creditors but duplicitous hosts: “[I]ndeed, one unscrupulous family with whom he lodged blackmailed him for years, extorting far more than he really owed.” But it gets better!

De Quincey was in his mid-forties by 1831, and more than a decade into his career.

Thomas De Quincey went through his life — unusually long given the circumstances — thinking he would achieve greatness through the accepted routes: a novel or a philosophical treatise.

Very interested

This is really interesting.

De Quincey wrote from personal familiarity, having known all three men during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. When he wrote about them twenty years later De Quincey ignored the constraints and repressions typical of biography in his era, and produced realistic and nuanced portraits

De Quincey, along with his rival William Hazlitt, set a high bar for what could be done in the strict confines of a magazine article

>"Consensus-based journalism thrived in more predictable and less anxious times. It doesn’t today."

Murder, De Quincey thought, insulated perpetrator and victim from 'the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs

Williamson is not the first writer to have been fired at lightning speed.

Such is what happened last week when The Atlantic terminated a writing spot for Kevin Williamson that they had created for him just two weeks before. The circumstances were strange, to be sure. While Jeffrey Goldberg claimed that he would not judge his writers on their bad tweets, it was on a bad tweet, from 2014, that Goldberg decided to reverse his call. “The Atlantic is not the best fit for his talents,” Goldberg wrote in a memo, “and so we are parting ways.”

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