I recently read A C Grayling’s biography The Quarrel of the Age: The Life and Times of William Hazlitt (2000). It’s the fascinating story of a fascinating man, elegantly written and immensely readable. Hazlitt was an essayist, arts critic, and a life-long radical. Unlike the friends of his youth, Coleridge and Wordsworth, he never abandoned his radical politics. He was devastated by the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte and the subsequent restoration of European monarchies. He was an independent thinker, who wrote in an intensely personal and original style. Hazlitt was also a philanderer, a man who had numerous infatuations and affairs, and who frequently visited prostitutes. In one bizarre and rather obscure incident in the Lake District, he is said to have “spanked” a local girl. Mmm. I think the word the biographer is struggling for is “assaulted”. According to Grayling, Hazlitt did this because she must have been “teasing him, or leading him on and then denying him”. Hazlitt later d...

In Part 1 of these three articles exploring the way in which the rail network influenced the suffrage campaign, I looked at how trains were instrumental in facilitating suffrage campaigns, including militant activism, as well as enabling suffrage organisations to set up and run their national networks. I also explored the way that trains became arenas for sometimes violent encounters between suffragettes and politicians. You can read "Cheap and Easy Railway Traffic: Suffrage and the Railways Part 1 here. The second part described how the Glasgow to London train became the focus of a struggle with the police when suffragettes attempted to rescue Mrs Pankhurst on her way to Holloway Gaol. You can read " Cheap and Easy Railway" Traffic Part 2: The Battle to Free Mrs Pankhurst here. In Part 3, I take a look at how trains and railway stations were themselves targets of suffragette militancy. In March 1913, Hugh Franklin, who we met in Part 1 when he assaulted...