Dinner with joseph johnson – Daisy Hay

Award-winning biographer Daisy Hay has captured an extraordinary portrait of a changing nation, focusing on publisher and bookseller Joseph Johnson whose weekly dinner gatherings in late 18th-century London saw guests including William Wordsworth, Mary Woolstonecraft, Samuel Coleridge and Joseph Priestley join him for brilliant, unpredictable and profound conversation. She talks to Caroline Sanderson about this radical age. Image: S G Haywood Photography