Wilfred Scawen Blunt, 1840-1922, was one of England's true eccentrics: a wildly individual, larger-than-life personality who was as admired as he was disliked. A writer, poet, rebel, politician and explorer, his controversial life was in every sense a ‘pilgrimage of passion'. He campaigned tirelessly for the independence of Egypt, India and Ireland (for which he was imprisoned) and, before marrying Byron's granddaughter, he travelled widely as a diplomat embarking on passionate love affairs and upsetting the Establishment – whether the British Empire or conventional morality. George Wyndham, Lord Curzon and Oscar Wilde were just some of the figures who attended Blunt's famous literary Crabbet Club and young Arabists like T.E. Lawrence and St John Philby regarded him as a prophet. During his lifetime, and for many years after, no anthology was complete without his poems. Based on Wilfrid Blunt's complete diaries and papers, Elizabeth Longford has produced a riveting biography of this most compelling man.

Elizabeth Longford, 1906–2002, was 'one of the finest British biographers of the last century'. She wrote highly acclaimed biographies of the Duke of Wellington (still regarded as definitive) Queen Victoria, the present Queen, and Byron, among others, continuing to write well into her 90s. Five of her children became writers: the journalist Catherine Longford, the novelist Rachel Billington, the biographer Antonia Fraser, the poet Judith Kazantzis, and the historian Thomas Pakenham. The Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography was established in 2003 in her memory.