Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Suspiria de Profundis, and 'The English Mail-Coach' are De Quincey's finest essays in autobiography, published here with three appendices containing a wealth of related manuscript material and a comprehensive introduction and notes.
Considers murder in a purely aesthetic light and explains how practically every philosopher over the past two hundred years has been murdered - 'insomuch, that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him'.
Published anonymously in The London Magazine, the Confessions were an immediate success, and soon speculation was rife as to the identity of the mysterious... Læs mere
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HOWARD MARKSOnce upon a time, opium (the main ingredient of heroin) was easily available over the chemist's counter.
Offers an account of the pleasures and pains of worshipping at the 'Church of Opium'. This autobiography of addiction hauntingly describes the author's surreal... Læs mere
De Quincey's seminal 1827 work was greatly influential on such writers as Poe, Baudelaire and Borges, and the trace of its impact can still be found today in modern satire, black humour and crime and detective fiction.
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater remains its author's most famous and frequently-read work and one of the period's central statements about both the power and... Læs mere
His troubled friendships with Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey inspired Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) to write these... Læs mere